UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a meeting in New York on global food security and strategies to combat ongoing food shortages in the wake of the global financial crisis.
Speaking at UN headquarters on Monday, Mr. Ban called the global food crisis “an issue that affects all of us because food security is about economic, environmental and national security for individual homelands and the world.”
For her part, Secretary Clinton argued that the crisis was ‘one of the most urgent threats facing our world,’ and pushed for the introduction of a comprehensive, coordinated approach to the problem focused as much on food production as on emergency aid to prevent famine.
With a world summit on food security set to take place in November, Mr. Ban and Ms. Clinton said new efforts to quell the crisis must assist small farmers with expertise to improve crop yields and improve infrastructure to get surplus produce to markets.
The State Department also posted this video about the causal factors, effects, and courses of action for combating the food crisis:
State Department – Global Food Security: U.S. Commitment to Action
Posted by Sara Chupein
