Word: aided
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...decade of progress against poverty could be obliterated in short order, World Bank president Robert Zoellick announced the bank would quickly spend about $1.2 billion to boost crop production in the world's poorest countries. U.S. President George W. Bush has committed about $360 million in U.S. emergency food aid, while the Asian Development Bank has vowed to give $500 million in emergency loans to the hardest-hit countries...
...Such aid is a stopgap solution to problems that have been brewing for years, but have only recently gone critical due to several complex factors: soaring oil prices; massive amounts of farmland diverted into producing biofuels; and crop failures from freak weather, including droughts in Australia and Europe and last month's cyclone in Burma (Myanmar). At the same time, millions of people in China and India can now afford to buy more food and eat more grain-fed meat, causing world food demand to soar...
...aid officials and food experts say there's a more fundamental reason why prices are rising: a world grown accustomed to plenty is increasingly unable to produce enough food to sustain itself. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told the world's leaders in Rome this week that farmers would need to grow 50% more crops by 2030 in order to avert a massive global shortage of food. "There is nothing more degrading than hunger, especially when it is man-made," Ban said...
...Underinvestment in agriculture was partly due to fears that funds would be wasted due to rampant corruption and mismanagement. "I remember going over to Sudan in 1985 and seeing donated tractors that had rusted over," says Ellen Levinson, executive director of the Washington-based Alliance for Food Aid. African nations' own policies have also been inadequate. In 2002, African Union leaders vowed to spend 10% of their annual budgets on agricultural development; few of the 53 member nations have consistently met that target. "We have been warning of the dangers for a long time," says Simon Scott, head of statistics...
...international organizations now face the task of getting new projects off the ground quickly. Obstacles abound. After decades of neglect, transportation networks for getting crops to market consist mainly of rutted dirt roads; irrigation systems are in a shambles; and there's little access to credit for poor farmers. Aid agencies are starting some programs virtually from scratch. "There are very few plans to take off the shelf," says Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington...