Every sixth Belarusian will starve

World leaders at a UN food summit in Rome are trying to hammer out a common agreement on how to fight world hunger. The impression is as if soaring food prices have come as a surprise to experts, governments and the United Nations, while one in six people, including every sixth Belarusian, lack food. Blame is being put on the companies that produce biofuels.

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Food prices are hitting record breaking highs around the world in the past thirty years. Hunger riots took place in many countries. The UN food and agricultural organizations point that industrialized nations should increase foodstuff production, to remove trade barriers and boost aid to the world’s poorest nations. Otherwise, the world can face a global catastrophe. But Belarus remains defiant over the hunger threat. President Alexander Lukashenka said in a state of the nation address recently that agrarian Belarus could even take an advantage of the situation by selling foodstuffs at higher prices.

However, Victor Radzivinovsky, the head of public information department at the UN Office in Minsk, says that global famine will unfortunately affect poor Belarusians as well.

ERB: Will this country be affected by this crisis?

“854 million around the world will be affected. This figure includes 820 million, living in the developing world; 25 million people in CIS countries with transitional economies; and 9 million in developed countries”.

ERB: We read in the press that the British dump 70,000 tons of foodstuffs annually, because they can’t finish it off. Is there a UN mechanism to send excessive food to Ghana, for instance, where people have to eat clay?

“There is no common mechanism. That’s why the summit in Rome is expected to reach a compromise on this issue”.

ERB: What is the main hurdle on the way to universal well-being: human greediness, climate change or trade barriers?

“This is a complex issue which includes the contributing factors like global speculations by various officials, climate change and biofuels”.

During the on-going UN food summit in Rome, the World Bank has allocated $1.5 billion to help tackle the soaring food prices.

The world’s poorest people are being hit the most. Food import costs have soared 40 percent, pushing the number of starving people up to 100 million across the world. The World Bank forecasts that the crisis will last until 2015, the year when grain, maize and rice prices are expected to stop climbing. A huge contributing factor is ethanol, produced from plants in order to provide fuel for cars. Mr Radzivinovsky says it would be better to make fuels from potato peels. What happens now is that people have to starve in order to feed our cars.