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Last Updated: Aug 26, 2008 - 2:14:23 PM |
Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP)
talked in Rome on the 29 June 2007, about the impact of climate change
on the WFP and its response, her talk was called, "WFP: Adapting to
Climate Change".
She said, "For WFP, climate change is not a theoretical debate--not
something we are studying to avoid and to mitigate for the future.
Adaptation to climate change is not a choice, but a reality for us as
the world’s largest humanitarian organization on the front lines of
hunger. Every day we feed millions of the world’s most vulnerable
people, many left destitute due to floods, droughts and other natural
disasters, some of which are caused or spurred by climate change." As a
result Sheeran noted that the WFP "must look ahead of the curve to help
vulnerable populations to adapt and mitigate the risks of climatic
changes which create a tremendous strain on local food supplies,
economies, and livelihoods."
For her climate change is a reality today, "Farmers throughout the
world know that predictable patterns in weather are more and more
becoming a thing of the past. How does the global food supply system
deal with such changing risk?" But things are getting worse, she noted
that "the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] predicts
yields from rain-dependent agriculture could be cut in half by 2020.
FAO estimates that 95 percent of agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is
rain-dependent. Anything even close to a 50 percent reduction in yields
would obviously pose huge new challenges for hunger.
This is hitting the world’s most vulnerable at the same time as soaring
demand for agricultural commodities, especially crops used for biofuels
production."
She also noted the conclusions of the the International Food Aid
Conference held in Berlin in May 2007, that, "climatic challenges and
demand for biofuels
are helping to push us into a post-food surplus era. So our reality is
that demand for food assistance is increasing while available food is
decreasing due to the loss of crop land from climatic changes and
natural disaster, rising prices, and an overall reduction in food
aid." For the WFP, "Ethiopia is our pilot country for developing new
solutions to climate and disaster risk", this includes buying food
locally and supporting local solutions, including regenerating
vegetative cover, and the WFP is "also working with the Ethiopian
government to design a comprehensive disaster risk financing project to
provide timely and effective resources to protect poor peoples'
livelihoods in the face of disaster risk for the next three years."
However much organizations like the WFP work to assist at local level
their work cannot alter the structural problems of the global food
market and the rising levels of prices and falling food stocks. We
need to focus on the availability of food, because this is the biggest
short-term threat to the lives of untold millions in the Third World,
or "The South".
Document: http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/newsroom/wfp131009.pdf
(c) Andrew Palmer 2008, TheWorldinCrisis.com
© Copyright 2008 by HaleJournal.com
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