News: Venezuela: ‘Capitalism behind biggest food crisis known’
Venezuela, along with Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia, criticised the final declaration of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Summit in Rome on June 5, arguing that the document failed to identify the true causes of rising food prices, such as agricultural subsidies and unequal trade policies imposed by developed countries.
Venezuelan ambassador to the FAO, Gladys Urbaneja Duran, objected to the document saying it lacked a “genuine humanitarian spirit” and aimed to present world hunger as merely a circumstantial crisis, when in reality it reflects a structural problem linked to the capitalist system and its mode of production and consumption.
Urbaneja rejected the position of the US delegation, which claimed the reason for the current food crisis was rapidly increasing demand from India and China, stating “The main reason is that food has been turned into yet another object of market speculation.”
According to FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, between $11 billion and $12 billion a year is spent on agricultural subsidies and restrictive tariff policies. In the absence of “clear commitments”, the Venezuelan delegate feared that the final declaration could become a “significant setback.”
“We missed an opportunity to take a firm and clear step in the struggle against the scourge of hunger”, Urbaneja concluded. (Full)
More posts on The Road about The Global Food Crisis
Source: The Road Daily
Picture courtesy Handicap International, A.Sutton
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
1 comments:
as long as we depend on international capitalistic concepts such as the oil-price, selling to the highest bidder, which is in a logical conclusion the most exploitent states such as the USA and the EU (and China furthermore) we can never emancipate our socialist solidarity from these states as we most depend on their goodwill to pay us the highest price.
By pure Logic you can tell us that this is leading us nowhere but into higher dependancy on the states which we, in common sense would assume to be the mother of so much socio-economic suffering in our part of the globe.
Isn't there a more noble and better way to get around?
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