The G-8 begins to meet tomor­row in Italy. There is a lot of con­cern amongst anti-poverty activists as to how much the issues of poverty will be addressed at the meet­ing. Host coun­try Italy has not done well in meet­ing their com­mit­ments to fund aid to the under-developed world. If fact, Italy has cut back on some of the funding.

So dur­ing tomorrow’s three hour meet­ing food secu­rity will share the agenda with global warm­ing. As a pre­view of what might be talked about in regards to food secu­rity, we turn to this arti­cle that we found at the Irish Times, writer Jamie Smith fills us in.

The G8 states are also expected to sign up to a new food secu­rity ini­tia­tive, which aims to replace food aid with more sus­tain­able aid to farm­ers in the devel­op­ing world. The Finan­cial Times reported yes­ter­day that the G8 would set up an $12 bil­lion fund to dis­burse over three years to reverse “the ten­dency of decreas­ing offi­cial devel­op­ment aid and national financ­ing to agri­cul­ture”. The US and Japan are likely to sup­ply $6–8 bil­lion and the EU and Canada the rest.

The ini­tia­tive may dampen crit­i­cism aimed at G8 states for fail­ing to live up to com­mit­ments they made in Scot­land in 2005 to halve world poverty and hunger by 2015. Since this announce­ment it is esti­mated a fur­ther 150 mil­lion peo­ple live in hunger, bring­ing the global total to more than one bil­lion, says Tom Arnold chief exec­u­tive of Con­cern. He said he wel­comed the announce­ment, which mir­rored many of the rec­om­men­da­tions in the Hunger Task Force report com­mis­sioned by the Government.

The food secu­rity ini­tia­tive rep­re­sents a major shift in US pol­icy. It is the world’s biggest food aid donor dis­burs­ing $2 bil­lion per year to poor coun­tries, much of which was pro­vided by US farm­ers – a pow­er­ful lobby in Washington.

Like

Unlike