PRESS RELEASE
FAO Head Calls for Doubling World Food Production
May 7, 2008 (EIRNS)—To feed the nine billion or so people who will be alive by the year 2050, it is necessary to double world food production, by applying technology and building infrastructure, U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Director General Jacques Diouf declared today.
Helga Zepp LaRouche, head of the international Schiller Institute and wife of American statesman Lyndon LaRouche, called two days before, for an international mobilization to turn the upcoming June 3-5 FAO world summit on world food security, into a discussion of exactly that: how to double world food production. "...It will be fatal for the world as a whole, if we do not succeed immediately, in the coming days and weeks, to declare globalization a failure, and to set everything into motion to double agricultural production capacity in the shortest possible time," Zepp-LaRouche warned in a call now circulating internationally.
Speaking from Haiti, one of the over 40 nations where food riots have occurred in recent months, Diouf argued that doubling world food production would not only satisfy those human beings who are to come, but the 862 million hungry people alive today.
The world will face the problem that there is not enough food available, and even countries which have money, will not be able to find food, because it will not be there to buy, he said. Today's food scarcity does not come from a lack of land or water, but rather from the lack of investment in infrastructure and technology, and in many cases, a lack of storage facilities.
Although failing to identify globalization as the genocide that it is, Diouf pointed to international conditions as another cause of scarcity, calling for a "market which is equitable." If subsidies are given, they must be given to all, he said.
