Biofuels are no villain.

• Author: Silva, Luiz Inacio Lula Da

Food security has always been at the top of my agenda. Upon taking office, my government launched a major domestic programme aimed at eliminating--not just alleviating--hunger at home. In 2003, the pioneering Zero Hunger programme has allowed millions of extremely poor Brazilians to have three square meals a day. Its success has encouraged me to believe that similar goals can be achieved at the global level, where millions fall victim to hunger every year. I have therefore put the fight against poverty at the top of Brazil's international agenda.

For this reason, in 2004, I joined a formidable array of world leaders from rich and poor countries to launch the Action Against Hunger and Poverty to meet this urgent challenge. We developed proposals to free a large part of humanity from the scourge of hunger and malnutrition. Together, we also developed creative ways to re-route money that previously went from financial speculation into weapons production or amassing exorbitant profits. We want it to serve the most humanitarian of goals--feeding hungry people. There has been progress. For example, a mechanism is now in place to finance treatment of endemic diseases in the poorest countries.

Yet, this is only a drop in the ocean compared to the huge task ahead. Let us keep in mind that every night over 800 million people around the world go to bed hungry. I find this reprehensible and an insult to humanity. There is no room for complacency.

This became abundantly clear over the recent months as soaring food prices triggered food riots and unrest in many countries around the world. And this gave an added sense of urgency to the High-Level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy, convened in June 2008 at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) headquarters in Rome.

It was and remains my conviction that the underlying challenge is fundamentally the same: to make public opinion recognize that poverty and hunger are not inevitable just because they have been around for so long. The technology and distribution networks are available; what is required is political will.

Perhaps the greatest and most welcome novelty is the fact that more people are eating. The poor in China, India, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, including Brazil, are eating more. This is cause for celebration. Droves of new consumers are joining the marketplace. Many countries that were considered poor in the past are now developing fast and improving the living conditions for their peoples. This crucial reality is here to stay.

During the discussions in Rome, there was an emerging consensus that no single explanation could be given for the crisis. I myself pointed out that the issue must not be dissociated from the wider context of the major global challenges facing the international community: soaring energy costs, and there-fore the cost of fertilizers and freight; rising global demand for foodstuffs; paralysis of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round of trade liberalization talks; and accelerating climate change. I will address these issues here drawing more from what I said at the Rome summit.

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

This bleak scenario underscores the need to improve global governance as we seek to forge concerted international responses to these major threats Yet what we have seen is quite the opposite. As individual nations or groupings seek to tackle specific issues, the outcome has often been new problems or the aggravation of existing ones. Nowhere is this clearer than with the immediate threat of food shortages.

These issues and their intricate linkages were the central focus of the summit in Rome One of the meeting's main outcomes, in fact, was a broad commitment to take urgent and coordinated action to boost food production, especially in the most vulnerable regions. To this end, a compact was agreed upon to invest heavily in research on high-yielding cereal strains. On this issue, Brazil has already taken a lead: for years now we have been sharing our experiences and expertise in tropical agricultural research with other developing countries.

True food security must be global and sustained through cooperation. This has been the motto behind Brazil's partnerships with...