While G7 finance ministers and central bankers deliberated in Rome over how to deploy resources to rescue their crumbling economies and financial systems, UN and other agencies were there to remind them that global poverty was on the rise again.
“The numbers of hungry and poor are increasing,” warned Lennart Bage, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad), noting that the long downward trend in the ranks of poverty had been reversed, partly due to continuing high prices of food and a fall in remittances.

Governments had to invest more in making agriculture more productive, he told the FT after addressing ministers on food security, reminding them that global food production needed to increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years.

Grain reserves are falling. “Seven out of the past nine years we have consumed more than we produced,” he added.

Investing in agriculture appears not to be a high priority of the wealthier nations represented in Rome at the weekend but 70 per cent of jobs in some African and Asian developing countries were in the agriculture sector, he noted.
The UN Millennium Campaign – anti-poverty activists — said it was estimated that the number of people living on less than $1 a day could rise by 40m and those on less than $2 a day by 100m as a direct result of the financial crisis. Although outside the conference the group lobbied ministers to create a “vulnerability fund” for poorer countries, to spell out their plans to deliver on aid commitment and avoid protectionism.

The Campaign says the economic crisis must not be used as an excuse by wealthier nations to cut their aid programmes. It also urged them to cut trade-distorting agricultural subsidies.

Mr Bage said the session on food security had been “very serious, very focused”.
Judging by the final communiqué of the G7 ministers, the anti-poverty movement has its work cut out. A one-sentence reference to poorer economies said: “The G7 also stresses the need to support emerging and developing countries’ access to credit and trade financing and resume private capital flows, and is committed to explore urgently ways, including through multilateral development banks, to enhance this support.”