Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda called on Sunday for urgent measures to provide food security to poor countries amid runaway prices that have sparked riots around the world.
“We need short, middle and long term solutions to the crisis,” Fukuda said after holding talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on the first leg of a European tour focused on the global food crisis.
The prime minister said the international community must act together to tackle soaring prices and shortages and vowed to put it at the top of the agenda of the G8 summit in Japan next month.
“Food producing countries no longer have sufficient stocks and are therefore trying to export less. This has become the case with more and more countries in recent months,” he said.
“This has pushed up prices and countries who cannot cope with the additional cost, no longer have enough food. So we have to sit down as the international community and come up with short-term relief measures,” Fukuda said.
He said that in the longer term, richer countries must help their poor counterparts, particularly in Africa, to be in a position to produce more food and become self sufficient.
“We need to export seed and know-how to those countries who need it,” he said.
Both Fukuda and Merkel warned that the production of biofuels as an alternative energy source must not be allowed to interfere with crop cultivation and aggravate food shortages.
“We must make sure that biofuel production does not compete with crop cultivation, that it does not interfere with the need to produce food,” Merkel said.
Both leaders called for steps to increase oil production and supply stability as prices soar above US$130 per barrel.
“What is important is that more oil should be produced and we should invest in this. We need a stable supply,” Fukuda said, adding, however, that: “We cannot ignore the market and just decide something.”
Fukuda’s trip is part of Japan’s preparations to host the G8 summit of leading industrialized countries from July 7 to July 9 at Toyako, a lakeside resort on the northern island of Hokkaido.
He said on Sunday that another important focus of the G8 meeting would be to ensure that emerging nations like China and India sign up to measures to cap the production of greenhouse gases.
“We have to bring those two countries on board,” he said.
Merkel agreed and vowed to help him lobby the two vast nations that say signing up to fixed targets on slashing greenhouse gases will hinder growth and their fight against poverty.
Fukuda, facing slumping approval ratings, hopes to use the G8 summit to boost Japan’s diplomatic clout and highlight its efforts to help tackle global warming and food shortages in developing countries.
Japan has promised US$100 million in emergency food aid and pledged last week at a summit with African leaders to help the continent double production of rice within a decade.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
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
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS