UN Officials Warn of Global Food Crisis

Recently, the Washington Post reported that "[m]ore than 100 million people are being driven deeper into poverty by a "silent tsunami" of sharply rising food prices, which have sparked riots around the world and threaten U.N.-backed feeding programs for 20 million children, the top U.N. food official said.

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program (WFP) said that, "[t]his is the new face of hunger -- the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are."  She also said, as reported, that, "[t]he world's misery index is rising."

The article reports that Sheeran and other private and government experts were hosted in Londan at the 10 Downing Street offices of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who said that, "the growing food crisis has pushed prices to their highest levels since 1945 and rivals the current global financial turmoil as a threat to world stability."

The British Prime Minister also said that, "[h]unger is a moral challenge to each one of us as global citizens, but it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of poor nations around the world."  He further is quoted as saying, that "25,000 people a day are dying of conditions linked to hunger."

The article also reports that, "[w]ith one child dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes, the time to act is now." Brown pleged "$60 million in emergency aid to help the WFP feed the poor in Africa and Asia, where in some nations the prices of many food staples have doubled in the past six months."  Please see earlier blogs where mention has been made of the increasing pressure on nonprofits to meet the global food crisis with shrinking resoures in a recession economy were the U.S. dollar goes weaker by the day.

AMT