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Rising food prices have been posing challenges to people and governments all over the globe, and will continue to do so, UN official David Nabarro told reporters here Friday through video-link from Geneva.
Nabarro is currently the coordinator of the secretary-general's High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, a 22- member team that includes representation from the across the UN system as well as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
"The whole system is working together in trying to understand and at the same time respond to the current situation where prices seem to be on upward trend and causing already some hardship," Nabarro said.
Prices of grain, wheat, maize, meat, sugar, and some vegetables are increasing by particularly large numbers, reports said.
"We are seeing the situation right now is one that is threatening, the potential to increase poverty, and the World Bank, a member of our high-level task force has already come out with a quantitative estimate suggesting that over 40 million people have been pushed into poverty as a result of the food price rises in recent months," said Nabarro.
He said that worldwide there are "two billion households earning less than two (U.S.) dollars per day, spending somewhere around three-quarters of their income on food, and they are now having to pay 15 percent more than they were this time last year for their basic food and their elasticity to cope with that increase is very limited indeed."
There are other problematic factors exacerbating the food price problem in some countries, Nabarro told reporters. These include the impacts of climate change and the recent El Nina weather phenomenon as well as political instabilities in some regions that disrupt food supply chains and decrease available supply.
The UN system has been investigating the impacts of rising food prices on individuals worldwide, according to Nabarro.
"UNICEF (The UN Children's Fund) has been analyzing this and saying that there are already households that are implementing coping strategies such as eating fewer meals and cutting their health expenditures and that this is already leading to increased levels of debt and longer working hours for adults and the capacity for households to respond to this kind of situation in 2011 is very limited because they've already had to cope with the impact of the economic changes," he said.
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