Friday, March 18, 2011

FAO, eastern African countries discuss ways of responding to current food price crisis

(Mar 18, 2011, People's Daily)--The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in partnership with the African Union (AU) on Thursday kicked off here a seminar aimed at enabling Eastern African countries to make informed decisions on how to respond to issues of high food prices.

The two-day high level seminar at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is part of FAO's series of seminars run from March through June 2011 worldwide to help governments make informed decisions to respond to high food prices, FAO said.

The organization also said the seminars are designed to raise awareness of various policy options and to design country specific immediate actions in response to rising food prices. Speaking at the opening of the seminar, Castro Camarada, FAO's coordinator in Eastern Africa, said the trend on prices of basic foodstuffs in the international markets is a matter of concern for the FAO as it raises the risk of the repetition of the food crisis in 2007/08.

Camarada noted that the then food crisis of 2007/08 had a devastating impact in developing countries that pushed some 80 million people into hunger.  Read more from People's Daily »

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