Transcript of Statement by Under-Secretary-General John Holmes at Press Conference on the Global Food Crisis and Q&A Highlights

John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, briefed journalists this afternoon in Geneva on the world food crisis. Yesterday, at a press conference in Bern, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the decision to establish a United Nations Task Force on the Global Food Crisis, and the appointment of Mr. Holmes as Task Force Coordinator. Following is a transcript of Mr. Holmes' opening statement to the first press conference in his capacity as Task Force Coordinator, as well as highlights from the question and answer session with journalists which followed.

"Thank you very much indeed and good morning everyone. I just thought it would be useful to have this kind of briefing to try and say a little bit more about how I see the issues and what role I play in this and to answer any questions that you might have. Just to clarify that a little bit, I will not have the answers to all of your questions, I'm sure, in particular if you start asking when is the Task Force going to meet, and exactly who is on it. These are the kinds of questions which obviously we are still working on.

But maybe it will helpful if I say a little bit about what it means to be the Coordinator of the Task Force. I think the main point here is that the meeting of the [United Nations System] Chief Executives Board yesterday in Bern, and the appearance on the press conference platform of some of the key players of the international Bretton Woods system – the Secretary-General of the United Nations; the head of the World Food Programme (WFP); the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); the head of the World Bank; the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – was, and was intended to be, a powerful symbol of the fact that those institutions are absolutely determined to work together, in an integrated and comprehensive way, to tackle the challenge which is there and from the dramatic rise we have seen in food prices over the last few years and particularly in the last few months and few weeks.

Everybody recognizes that this is a major challenge. Everybody recognizes it has many dimensions. Of course there is an immediate humanitarian dimension. There is an immediate dimension of the need to increase agricultural production this year, particularly in developing countries where the response to the obvious price signals is not quite so clear. There is a need to make sure that countries responding to this in terms of their trade policies are doing so in ways which are helpful to the whole response to the crisis rather than unhelpful.

So, there are those short-term issues. There are also a lot of medium- and longer term issues which go with that – of course, the question above all of stimulating agriculture production in the world to meet the needs. Because our essential assumption here is that this is a problem – whatever the other factors behind it – this is a problem caused by the fact that demand for food globally has exceeded supply. So that needs to be corrected, and that needs to be corrected over the long term.

There are the medium- and longer term trade issues, for example the issue of the Doha Round, the issue of liberalization of agricultural trade, how far can we take that, how will that respond to the needs of the moment. There is obviously the question of biofuels, and how that plays into this crisis – what are the right measures to take, the right attitude to take to that? Clearly, it is something that needs a new look in present circumstances without wanting to fall in any sense into knee-jerk reactions of saying all biofuels are bad or good. We need to look at it in a careful, sophisticated and differentiated way, between different regions of the world and between different products. And there are other similar issues which arise about new technologies in food production, for example, such as GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms). So there's a lot of issues there which we need to look at and integrate in a comprehensive way.

As I say, what was decided yesterday and announced yesterday and the way it was announced was intended to symbolize that the world intends to work together, or the main institutions of the world intend to work together, to try and bring a comprehensive response to it.

So, where do I fit into it as Coordinator? I think the title means what it says. I am not posing as the great expert on these issues, I am simply there to help bring these different institutions together. And, of course, let's not forget, because it's very important, to try to bring in civil society more widely – expertise that is available outside these main institutions – and not least the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who have a huge role to play on both the humanitarian and the development side. So we need to make sure we find ways of involving them in that too. So, just in the same way that the Secretary-General can play a role of bringing the system together under his leadership, I can help to bring people together in a coordinating role.

My appointment doesn't mean that we regard this as a predominately humanitarian crisis. As I said, there is a humanitarian angle to it, but there are many other angles too. It is simply that the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is a coordinating organization. My role is a coordinating one, and therefore I can bring the institutions together from that relatively neutral point of view.

What we will be trying to do, as I think the documents you have seen yesterday make clear, is to try to put together a plan of action, covering all the issues I talked about – both short-, medium- and long-term – around which the institutions and leaders around the world can coalesce, with a first target for looking towards this kind of plan the meeting in Rome, from 3 to 5 June, which is being organized by the three Rome-based food and agriculture agencies – that is FAO, WFP, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The Secretary-General, I think, will be there and will probably be giving the initial keynote opening speech. So that's one initial target for this work, which has already started and been going on.

But there are other major meetings coming up too. There will be a special session of the Economic and Social Council in New York in the third week of May. Of course, the Group of Eight (G-8) will be looking at this at some point, and no doubt many other meetings and conferences will be doing [so] too. So the key point there is, as I say, is to, insofar as we can, bring people together and make sure the policies are coordinated and that the messages are coordinated.

Just on the point of messages, what we are keen to do is to ensure that we recognize the breadth and complexity of the issue, and the challenges it produces, without describing it as if it were an emergency facing the whole world in a sort of panic-stricken way. Because I think it is clear we can fix these problems. The solutions can be found; the solutions are there. They are very difficult, some of them, in the short term, but they can be done. And this can also be an opportunity, not least for agriculture in the developing world to move in a way that it has not done for some years.

Let me just say, finally, I have just been chairing a meeting of the heads of the agencies and organizations which are represented on the Inter-Agency Standing Committee. This is a body which brings together the main humanitarian United Nations agencies, the representatives of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and consortia of the key NGOs in the world. And we have been having a discussion not just of this issue, but of the complex of issues related to climate change – because that is clearly an important factor in this here somewhere too – to the rise in food prices, and to other challenges we may face in the future. And what was clear from is that there is a determination to address these in a comprehensive way, taking into account all the factors, to avoid "silos" behind what is humanitarian and what is development, and to avoid looking at climate change and agriculture and food issues for the future as if they were separate problems when it is perfectly clear that they are closely related. That was one of the clear messages we have taken from the discussion, together with that determination to tackle it in an urgent and integrated way, to make sure we are covering both the short-term problems and the long-term issues."

A journalist said the Secretary-General yesterday in his lecture had given some examples of countries that were really suffering now. Could Mr. Holmes give an example of six or seven countries that were most hit by the food crisis, and how did the crisis impact on Darfur, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia and Iraq, and others which have compounded situations with conflict? Also, why was the Rome meeting scheduled so far off – on 3 to 5 June. People could start dying between now and then.

In response, Mr. Holmes said that he believed that is was very hard and not very wise to try to give a list of the most affected countries, partly because that information was hard to assemble in the short term. What they needed to look at was the much wider picture as this was a global issue. It had not affected every country. For many countries and population groups it was inconvenient, a problem for their daily budget and their purses, but it was not a matter of life and death. In some places and for some groups, particularly those living on less than a dollar a day, that quickly could become a matter of life and death, or certainly of increased suffering and malnutrition. They had already seen some of the immediate effects, in terms of unrest, could occur all over the world.

Mr. Holmes said that there was a need in their response to distinguish between the groups of the population where the needs in terms of nutrition and food might be greatest, and those where the political unrest might be greatest, and those might not be exactly the same. They needed to look carefully to decide where to give their help which was needed. They needed to target the most vulnerable groups, whether they be very young children – given what they knew about the affects of malnutrition for life – as well as the elderly, the sick, pregnant and lactating mothers.

Insofar as the effect on particular conflict situations like Gaza or Darfur or Somalia, clearly it was going to make these issues more complicated and more difficult to deal with if food was harder to buy and more expensive to provide. But he did not believe that they should isolate these as if they were going to be where the crisis was the worst. It would be more generalized than that. Certainly, there would be pockets of particular needs in those situations.

Mr. Holmes said that what they were looking at here was that because prices were rising, and in some places availability may become more difficult as a result, people, in particular those with the lowest incomes, would be eating less and less well. But he did not think that in the very short term, they were talking about starvation and famine. They should avoid that kind of language. It was more a case of nutritional stress in populations, and their task was to see how to address that and where to address it, both in the short and long term.

A journalist said Mr. Holmes seemed to advocate a nuanced approach to biofuels. As the Secretary-General said only the other day, the United Nations was in the business of feeding hungry people, not feeding motor cars. What positive thing could he say about biofuels.

In response, Mr. Holmes said that biofuels were developed in response to a very serious problem, which was the effects of climate change and the need to mitigate that and to reduce emissions. They were not invented just for fun. Whatever they were doing, the needed to ensure that food production remained high, and that they were not making another problem which was very serious and long-term and fundamental. There were geographical areas of the world where growing crops for biofuels might make sense but others where it might not make sense because of the nature of the land or the nature of production. There were products where it made sense to use them for biofuels, and other crops which were not so useful to use. There were some crops that had no food value, but could be very useful as biofuels, and there was a particular nut in India which was in that category. That was why he said they needed to look at biofuels in a differentiated way, and not say all biofuels were bad. Clearly they needed to look at this question again, in the light of what was now known on the state of agricultural production and the balance between demand and supply. It needed to be looked at in a sophisticated way, rather than a knee-jerk reaction.

A journalist said most of what they had heard from Mr. Holmes today, they had heard yesterday in Bern. What was he going to do now, today or tomorrow? There was this sense of urgency, but they did not understand what it meant in practice. Regarding agricultural subsidies, something that was in the strategy, the United Nations somehow collaborated by accepting subsidized food from the United States. Mrs. Sheeran said very clearly yesterday that 70 per cent of the food in Darfur came from the United States as a donation. What could they do in order to avoid the United Nations perhaps being part of the problem and not the solution?

Mr. Holmes, responding to the questions, said on the sense of urgency, clearly there was a sense of urgency. The fact that they were producing an overall plan did not mean that they were waiting for it to happen before any action was taken. Action was already being taken by the World Food Programme and others in trying to respond the immediate needs. No one was waiting to act. What they were saying was that the work was under way to try to produce a comprehensive plan which everyone could rally to, which was a logical response to this kind of problem. That could not be produced literally overnight, but they would do so in very short order. Meanwhile, they were trying to react and to use all the resources they had to address the immediate needs.

Insofar as subsidies and agriculture were concerned, subsidies in agriculture were, in the same sense as biofuels, an issue that needed to be looked at again in the present situation. There was an opportunity to move to a more logical, rational and effective system of investment in agriculture than they had had in recent years. That might involve looking at some of the issues like the agricultural subsidies in the United States or the European Union. He did not want to prejudge that debate. It was true, 70 per cent of the food aid in Darfur came from the United States, but that was very much a shrinking phenomenon, in terms of the subsidized surpluses which did not really exist any more. Ms. Sheeran had also mentioned that 80 per cent of World Food Programme food aid was now purchased locally, with the aim of stimulating local agriculture and local markets, not distorting them by importing food aid.

Asked whether the United Nations position was against a moratorium of biofuels, as proposed by Jean Ziegler, Mr. Holmes said they could not simplify the United Nations position. It did not have a position for or against a moratorium. But they could deduce from what he had been saying that there should be a sophisticated, differentiated, carefully calculated approach to this. So an instant moratorium did not seem to fit with that, but the United Nations system as such had not taken a position in any formal sense.

A journalist asked what the Task Force would be doing until the Rome meeting in June. Mr. Holmes said essentially, the Task Force would be trying to devise this comprehensive action plan which he had talked about to make sure that there was an integrated approach and to make sure there was something on the table by that June meeting that the Heads of State and Government and the institutions that would be there could all rally around and agree that that was the way forward.

To produce such a broad action plan was a pretty ambitious target for four weeks. Some of the elements of it were reasonably clear, but others needed to be sorted out, Mr. Holmes said. That did not mean that nothing was happening in the meantime. All the emergency responses they were talking about in the usual mode would be happening and action would be taken to ensure that the agriculture inputs needed for farms in the developing world to stimulate their production for this year's harvest would be taken.

In response to a question on the Task Force's composition and structure, Mr. Holmes said the general shape of the Task Force was fairly clear: the Secretary-General would chair it and it would consist of the heads of the key agencies and institutions involved: the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund; the WFP; FAO; IFAD; WTO; World Health Organization; and a number of others who had interest in this who were likely to be invited to joint. He did not want to give a definitive list now. The Task Force would meet at regular intervals. He could not say when it would start, but obviously soon. Clearly underneath that structure there was a need for a Secretariat, and core groups of key actors at senior working level on a full-time basis to write the papers necessary and drawing the different action plans together.

On the question of funding and financing, Mr. Holmes said it was not possible for them yet to put a figure on what the immediate humanitarian needs might be for the coming year. That work was still under way. Meanwhile, clearly WFP needed extra funding, and they had had a reasonably generous response from donors, but they need that cash in hand. FAO were already using their existing resources, and appealing for more resources. There was a need to put those funding needs together into a short-term funding structure or framework.

As far as the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) was concerned, obviously it was available precisely for these kinds of situations, and they had already used it to address some of the emergency situations that had emerged, for example in Afghanistan. But there were questions about whether CERF was big enough to respond to all of those needs. It was a moving picture, and they would be using all their funding mechanisms. However, the challenges were such that they would need additional assistance, rather than looking to move existing pots of money around, Mr. Holmes pointed out.

Asked when the Task Force had been named, and whether it had a clear mandate, Mr. Holmes responded that the Task Force had been announced and set up yesterday, as a result of the meeting of the CEB in Bern, although the Secretary-General had announced the possibility of a Task Force a few days previously, in Accra, Ghana. While a date for its first meeting could not be given, the work that needed to underpin it, and its structure, had already started. The aim of the Task Force was to try and create a comprehensive, integrated action plan around which everyone could rally.

A journalist asked Mr. Holmes' opinion regarding agricultural subsidies, and in particular to comment on WTO head Pascal Lamy's statement yesterday regarding how such subsidies distorted food prices and should be eliminated. She'd also heard a report that there are many people making a lot of money owing to these high food prices. How did he intend to get around them? Finally, it had been suggested yesterday that this crisis was an opportunity to somehow restructure the way in which agriculture was taking place in developing countries. Could he comment on whether there was a better way?

Responding on the issue of agricultural subsidies, Mr. Holmes said it was an opportunity to look again at the structure of agricultural subsidies and trade and to find a system that was more efficient and more equitable for farmers and consumers. That was what Pascal Lamy had been saying yesterday. It was obviously an opportunity to tackle some of the issues that had bedevilled the Doha Round, and if at all possible to reach a conclusion on that.

On agriculture in developing countries, there was a recognition around the system that that had been neglected in terms of investment in the past, Mr. Holmes said. But this was an opportunity to right that and to give agriculture the very important place it needed in development plans for developing countries. Most studies showed that if you could increase the profitability of agriculture in developing countries that was an excellent way to tackle poverty.

On the excessive profits and trade speculation, while Mr. Holmes said that clearly there might be some element of speculation in the major prices spikes seen – for example for rice – the price rises were driven by more fundamental elements than speculation. There might be some more short-term volatility, but it was beyond his remit to say that they were trying to stop it or stop the way agricultural commodities were traded at the moment.

A journalist, recalling that a few days ago Mr. Holmes had said that the number of people killed in Darfur might reach as high as 300,000, wondered what the basis of that calculation was? As far as he knew, the former figure of 200,000 had been based on private estimations or extrapolations and had never been certified by the United Nations, and had been staunchly challenged by the Sudanese, who cited a figure of 9,000 killed.

Responding, Mr. Holmes said the figure of 200,000, which had been given by his predecessor in 2006, was based on a study by the World Health Organization in Darfur to try and establish how many "extra deaths" resulted from the conflict in Darfur. One should be very careful to distinguish between casualties from fighting and combat – and that was the figure the Sudanese Government were talking about – and extra deaths caused by the conflict, which were to do with disease, malnutrition, stress, upheaval and the effects on vulnerable groups of the conflict making extra deaths occur compared to what there would have been if the conflict had not been there.

That estimate of 200,000 deaths had been made two years ago. If that estimate were right, than the figure could not still be 200,000, but must be much larger than that, perhaps as much as 300,000. He had said at the time that it was not a totally scientifically based figure; it was an extrapolation from that study, but it did not seem to be unreasonable and some people would regard it as a conservative estimate.