The United Nations chief agriculture official on Friday called on the international community to overcome challenges arising from population explosion, environmental degradation, and global warming in global efforts to eliminate poverty and ensure food security.

Addressing an international workshop on agriculture and rural development in the 21st century, Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, said the world has to overcome the challenges raised by population increases, income growth and urbanization.

"With virtually all of the world's population growth between 2000 and 2030 expected in urban areas, supplying the expanding urban markets is a major challenge for agriculture and food marketing systems in the years to come," he told the two-day workshop held by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture in cooperation with FAO.

Diouf said the pace of dietary change, both qualitative and quantitative, accelerates as countries become richer and populations become increasingly urbanized, which has important implications for food security, nutrition and health policy in the developing countries.

The UN official also called for attention to challenges resulting from globalization and the changing patterns of international trade.

He said the challenge facing the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to manage and further adjust the new rules-based agricultural trading system in a way which is conducive to achieving greater efficiency, transparency and fairness with equal opportunities for all in international agricultural trade.

He said the natural resources upon which agriculture depends are limited and are increasingly degraded.

"Water, land, and biodiversity overuse and degradation threaten the potential of agriculture to contribute to sustainable rural livelihoods. Population growth and rising levels of per capita consumption place increasing pressure on the availability and quality of water resources which, in turn, compromise ecosystems that are vital to regulation, supply and purification."

"There is an urgent need to invest in research, new technologies and better management practices to raise productivity, promote equitable access and conserve the resource base for the future."

On global climate change, he said the precise impact of climate change on agriculture and food production are difficult to gauge.

"For the world as a whole, climate change is unlikely to alter the overall production potential. The benefits of warmer climates for some areas may just be offsetting the problems arising in other areas. In some of the adversely affected areas, however, climate change could jeopardize the livelihoods of millions, particularly where its impacts are compounded by other factors or where existing poverty and hunger prevail."

"Such areas of multiple stress are expected to emerge primarily in the poorest developing countries, but also some of the emerging Asian economies could well be affected."

He said multiple constraints of poor rural infrastructure pose challenges to most developing countries.

"Throughout the 1990s, many countries invested substantially in rural infrastructure. Yet rural areas in most developing countries still face inadequate levels of services and often a deteriorating stock of physical infrastructure, resulting in high costs to bring modern inputs to farmers and their products to the regional and international markets."

"The highest priority must go to investment in water for irrigation, rural roads and basic infrastructure to stimulate private investments in food storage, processing and marketing," said the UN official.

The official said food quality and safety and the incidence of plant and animal pests and diseases remain a challenge to the world.

The plant and animal health systems of many developing countries are weak, leaving them unprepared to deal with severe disease and pest outbreaks. In some cases, such problems can threaten the livelihood of millions of people both within and beyond the country of origin, he told the workshop.

"In this context, regulatory services for food safety and quality, plant and animal health are in the vital interest of domestic consumers and producers as well as the international community."

Diouf said the world has yet to meet the challenges that involve harnessing the best of modern science and technology.

"We need the best of modern science and technology to meet the challenges of an increasingly commercialized and globalized agriculture sector, and to provide new impetus for addressing the age-old problems of production variability and food insecurity of rural populations living in marginal production environments."

He said biotechnology, for example, holds great promise for the world to increase agricultural production, but may involve new risks.

"In most countries, the scientific, political, economic or institutional basis is not yet in place to provide adequate safeguards for biotechnology development and application, and to reap all the potential benefits."

He said the international community faces a moral imperative to assist the developing world by increasing their contributions of development assistance and by better targeting their assistance to the agricultural sector, while governments of the developing countries themselves face a similar imperative.

Despite progress in the global fight against hunger and poverty in the past few decades, he said one person in six in the world still goes to bed hungry each night as 852 million men, women and children suffer chronic undernourishment and many more various forms of malnutrition. Enditem
 
(Xinhua News Agency September 10, 2005)