PALO ALTO, Calif., May 19 (UPI) -- Decades of neglect by international food and agricultural organizations have left many countries with less food to feed their people, a U.S. analyst says.
"There has been a very deep institutional failure over how we deal with food problems," C. Peter Timmer of Stanford University who studies food security, told The Washington Post. "Everybody understands that 80 percent of the world's poor are in rural areas. But the World Bank for 30 years has basically said market signals don't support agriculture, so we can't support agriculture."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has convened a task force of agencies to present an action plan for lowering trade barriers, boosting agricultural production and extending help to the poorest at a summit in Rome.
Responsibility for the crisis is shared, scholars said, among the organizations, poor countries -- primarily in Africa -- that fail to invest in agriculture and wealthy governments undercutting African farmers through agricultural subsidies at home.
But multilateral organizations play a key role.
"These are the organizations we've got," said Paul Collier, an economics professor at Oxford University. "It took the second world war to produce them and we better try to make them work."
