| Climate change pushes up global food prices | Send to a friend |
| Tuesday, 08 November 2011 22:55 |
 By Ludger KasumuniThe Citizen Reporter Dar es Salaam. Food prices will continue to rise in the country due to absence of remedial measures to control environmental degradation, the UN in Tanzania has said. Mr Alberic Kacou, the Resident Co-ordinator of the UN in the country noted that unless concrete policy measures are implemented to mitigate climate change effects Tanzanians will face unbearable food crisis in the near future. Despite rising transport costs food prices are still stable, but things might change for the worse in the near future. “World food prices are expected to increase by 30 to 50 per cent in real terms in the next few years. The greatest risk is faced by 1.3 billion people around the globe involved in agriculture,” Mr Kacou said last week at the launch of ‘The Human Development Report’. Globally about 40 per cent of the land is degraded due to human and non-human related activities such as soil erosion, infertility, quarrying, urbanisation and overgrazing and in addition to that land productivity is declining with estimated yield loss of around 50 per cent. Deforestation is a major challenge because during the last two decades, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa had experienced the greatest forest losses, said Kacou. “About 231,000 hectares is lost every year due to forest fires and illegal cutting of trees,” he said.The Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, Peniel Lyimo said for a country like Tanzania that depends much on natural resources for development environmental degradation should be treated as the foremost challenge affecting development. “This year alone at least Sh100 billion was spent on purchasing 330,000 metric tons of food for distributing to regions facing food shortage so that people can buy them at subsidised prices,” the Permanent Secretary said. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
