Nov 12, 2002 2 min read

WASHINGTON (AP) – Trade barriers and subsidies used by the United States and Europe were blamed by Latin American officials Monday for a failure to come to grips with the 54 million people the United Nations says are malnourished in the region. “We can’t compete with the treasury of other countries,” Costa Rica’s agriculture minister, Rodolfo Coto Pacheco, said at a U.N. hunger forum at the Inter-American Development Bank.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has set of goal of cutting world hunger in half by 2015, including in Africa were 14.4 million people in six countries face starvation.

In recent weeks, however, the agency has expressed doubt about its ability to reduce famine substantially, blaming in part a controversy that has arisen over genetically engineered crops from seeds produced in abundance by the United States but rejected by several African governments.

But it was U.S. and European trade policies that agriculture officials from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia and other Latin American countries blamed for compounding poverty and hunger in rural areas of their countries, citing as just one example a drop in export prices of coffee to 50 cents a pound.

Jacques Diouf, the FAO’s director-general, said poor countries have been investing in efforts to boost food production, but improving farmers’ access to agricultural markets is the key to easing hunger.

“Unless we reach out to those who grow crops, who raise animals or who fish, I don’t think we will be able to devise anything that is effective,” Diouf said.

Poor countries have complained that U.S. and European farmers are encouraged through subsidies by their governments to grow more food than they otherwise would, which depresses world prices and makes it hard for farmers in developing nations to compete on the world market.

The Bush administration said this summer it is prepared to seek cuts in subsidies as part of a global trade agreement.

Antonio Ruiz, undersecretary of rural development in Mexico, said developing countries should look to ways to increase their trade leverage other than by enacting subsidies or retaliatory tariffs on food imports.

Among his suggestions were innovative packaging and marketing of their own products, including to their own citizens as Mexico has done with white corn.

“We didn’t have to resort to price distortions,” Ruiz said.

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On the Net: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization: http://www.fao.org/