UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday held talks with key development agencies on how to tackle the crisis provoked by soaring food and fuel prices.
“This is an exciting time for the United Nations, but it is also a time when we are challenged to exert our best efforts to rise to the expectations that the world is placing on us,” Ban said ahead of meetings in the Swiss capital.
The UN was to hammer out a plan of emergency measures at the two-day conference in Berne, while exploring other longer-term measures to solve the food crisis.
The talks were expected to see advocates of protectionism face off against those who favor opening up markets, as well as arguments between both supporters and opponents of biofuels.
Rising populations, strong demand from developing countries, increased cultivation of crops for biofuels and increasing floods and droughts have sent food prices soaring across the globe.
In Geneva, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food said on Monday that WTO efforts to rush trade liberalization talks work against those who are starving.
Jean Ziegler, whose mandate ends today, also called for the suspension of bio-fuel production that he accused of being one of the causes of the sharp increase in food prices.
“The line taken by Pascal Lamy [director general of the WTO] is completely against the interests of people dying of hunger because it’s exactly the protectionist taxes that allow farmers to cultivate food crops,” he said.
According to the WTO, “agricultural subsidies of rich countries have destroyed agriculture of poor countries, and a more open system would result in less distortion.”
Speaking to the press in Geneva, Ziegler said that Ban’s meeting with the leaders of UN agencies in Berne later in the day was to be “an essential day for hungry people around the world.”
He also criticized the IMF, which he claimed has “imposed on the poorest countries” the cultivation of non-food products, thereby further cutting down on the cultivation of food produce.
He welcomed IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s “reversal” on the subject and called on governments to “put a priority on the cultivation of food produce.”
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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