(AFP) – Jun 5, 2008

WARSAW (AFP) — The world's farmers were bypassed at this week's Rome UN food summit, reflecting a crucial gap in addressing the crisis at its most basic level, the leader of a global farmers' group said Friday.

"It's a reflection of how disconnected and dis-linked our multilateral agencies are, from the situation on the ground," Ajay Vashee, the freshly- elected head of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) told AFP at the close of the 38th World Farmers' Congress in Warsaw, Poland.

"The people who have the ability to actually do something about this crisis were precluded," Vashee said, adding it was a recipe for "confusion and chaos." Uniting 600 million independent family farmers in 115 organisations from 80 countries around the globe, IFAP is the world's largest farmers' organisation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) crisis summit which ended Thursday in Rome pledged 6.5 billion dollars (4.1 billion euros) in emergency food relief and vowed to halve global hunger by 2015 by taking "urgent" action over the global food crisis.

"I'm worried about the importance and priority of farmers in this whole equation," Vashee told AFP.

"It's an emergency measure but it's crucial not to lose sight and focus on the longer-term sustainability of our food supply," said the 47-year-old Zambian farmer, previously head of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions, representing 14 southern African states.

The IFAP congress drove home the message that the world food crisis is the result of decades of underinvestment in and neglect of the agricultural sector, particularly in the developing world.

The crisis is also a wake-up call for developing nations to turn subsistence farmers into agricultural entrepreneurs able to feed growing populations, it said.

Among other measures, the federation urged developing states to invest in their farm sectors, build commodity supply chains to help small farmers process and market goods as well as to implement risk-management schemes counter-balancing exposure on the free market in an era of ever-greater weather-related losses.

The world's farmers must also be made part of international action to curb climate change, the IFAP concluded.

It further insisted that farmers are not to blame for the spike in global food commodity prices.

"There are a lot of fingers in the till between the farmer and the consumer," asaid Tom Buis, head of the United States National Farmer's Union (NFU).

US farmers get 20 cents of every food dollar spent by consumers, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Marketing, processing, wholesaling, distribution and retailing account for 80 percent of retail prices.

More than 20 years of underinvestment in the farm sector, not biofuels, are to blame for the current food price crisis, according to Martin Howard of Britain's NFU.

"It's not a question of choosing between food and fuel. The world has no shortage of agricultural land to produce either, but it has been short of agricultural investment for a long time," he said.

A recent UN FAO report estimated that, to meet rising demand, food production must jump 50 percent by 2030.

Despite record production in 2008, food prices are expected to remain high, impacting on the world's poor and sparking riots in countries reliant on imports, the FAO report noted.

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