UN Urges G8 Leaders to Step Up to the Plate on African Hunger, Global Warming
New York, Jul 6 2005 11:00AM
As leaders of the world’s richest nations gathered for the G8 Summit, United Nations agencies urged them today to rise
to the challenge of the two main issues on their agenda – aid to Africa and global warming - reminding them that hunger
is the world’s biggest killer and calling for even deeper cuts in greenhouse gases.
“Remember a simple fact: hunger and malnutrition are still the world’s biggest killers, taking the lives of more people
every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined,” the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said in a statement ahead of
the summit opening in Gleneagles, United Kingdom.
“Nowhere is this more apparent than in Africa, where forgotten conflicts and hidden disasters continue to expose
millions to the scourge of hunger. One African in three is malnourished and there has been little sign of change in that
over the last decade,” it added.
“Hunger is a symptom of failure – failed harvests, failure to cope with natural disasters, and failure to overcome
social inequities, ethnic strife and racial hatred.”
Citing a litany of enormous challenges, WFP noted that in Africa alone, it is together with its partners to deliver
emergency food to 26 million people in more than 20 different countries.
In Southern Sudan, where civilians are finally returning home after decades of war, its operations are still less than
half funded; in southern Africa, where the triple threat of HIV/AIDS, drought and weak government capacity threaten the
lives of at least 8 million people, it has received less than 20 per cent of the requested funding; in Niger and Mali,
where a lethal combination of locust infestation and drought has left hundreds of thousands hungry, less than a third of
the $11 million needed has been received.
“While there have been encouraging signs of increased aid commitments from donor governments, the food aid component,
which is so critical in Africa, is falling short,” WFP said. “Food is the ‘first aid’ solution to Africa’s problems. It
brings hope in often turbulent circumstances, and stabilizes regions so there is an opportunity to work on longer-term
humanitarian and political solutions.”
For its part the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reiterated calls for a new effort to move beyond targets and
time-tables agreed under the Kyoto treaty against global warming towards the even deeper cuts in greenhouse gases
necessary to stabilize the world’s climate.
Of the summit participants only the United States has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which industrialized countries are to reduce their combined emissions of
six major greenhouse gases during the five-year period from 2008 to 2012 to below 1990 levels.
ENDS