Former US president Bill Clinton and activist-rockers Bob Geldof and Bono called on business leaders on Wednesday to do their part to help solve the international food crisis that pushed 75 million people into hunger and poverty last year alone.
Clinton said businesses could help solve the problem by providing farm credits, help improve agricultural productivity and foster storage and distribution systems in developing countries.
“This is not a thing that government can do alone. We have to have heavy private sector involvement,” Clinton said. “The money here is not going to be massive and the payoff is going to be great.”
PHOTO: EPA
He said he believed the future would see much more food produced locally and that would help reduce world hunger.
“The energy prices and supply reality alone, the inevitable necessity to get the developing world involved with the developed world in the fight against climate change, all of these things are going to drive us toward more agricultural self-sufficiency,” Clinton said.
Clinton and Geldof spoke at a luncheon devoted to bringing the private sector into a partnership with government and civil society to help meet the UN millennium development goal of halving the number of hungry people on Earth by 2015.
Currently, there are some 923 million people going hungry on the planet and world food production will have to double by 2050 to keep up with population growth, according to the UN.
Geldof, for his part, challenged the private sector to look at the problem, especially in Africa — the world’s poorest continent — as a business opportunity rather than a charity case.
“There should be a logical approach to the business of Africa, a continent that has yet to be built and is open for business,” he said. “There’s nothing that means you have to there with a bleeding heart, anything different than just creating profit, opportunity and growth.”
He also pointed out how skewed investment for agriculture was in a continent that is home to some 900 million people.
“The fact that Africa gets US$2 billion every year for agriculture is pathetic when Europe gets 40 billion euros and America gets US$60 billion for their agriculture,” Geldof said. “It makes no sense.”
While top executives attending the meeting from companies ranging from The Coca-Cola Company to Intel Corporation, cellphone maker Ericsson and French oil company Total sounded upbeat, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sounded a note of caution.
“I’m frankly worried we will miss the goals,” he said in his opening remarks assessing a gloomy scenario that included a burgeoning financial crisis, rising fuel and food prices and the challenges presented by global climate change.
As Congress debates a White House-proposed US$700 billion bailout for the worst financial crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, Bono questioned why wealthy countries had not been able to come up with enough aid for the world’s problems.
“It is extraordinary to me that you can find US$700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 but can’t find US$25 billion to save 25,000 children who die every day of preventable treatable disease and hunger,” the U2 lead singer told Clinton’s fourth annual philanthropic summit in New York. “That’s mad, that is mad.”
“This crisis is not an excuse to walk away from the world’s challenges, but a compelling reason to intensify our efforts to meet them, around the corner and around the world,” said Clinton, who has focused on humanitarian work since leaving the White House in 2001.
The Group of Eight wealthy nations vowed in 2005 to raise annual aid levels US$50 billion by 2010, US$25 billion of which was to go to Africa. But under current spending plans, the G8 will fall US$40 billion short, according to a June report by the Africa Progress Panel set up to monitor implementation.
“Bankruptcy is a serious business and we all know people who have lost their jobs,” Bono said, referring to the bankruptcy declared by Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings. “But this is moral bankruptcy.”
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