Accra, Oct. 16, GNA - More than one billion people are hungry worldwide, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday. In a statement read for him in Accra to mark this year's World Food Day, Mr. Ban said food and nutritional security were the foundations for descent life, sound education and the achievement of all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The theme for the celebration and the TeleFood Campaign being undertaken by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is "Achieving Food Security in Times of Crisis". Mr Ki-moon noted that since the past two years, volatile food prices= , economic crisis, climate change and conflict had led to a dramatic and unacceptable increase in the number of people who could not access sufficient food to sustain them.

He said in the developing world, food prices remained high adding: "= we must respond to the needs of the hungry, by ensuring adequate political a= nd financial support for emergency food assistance."

Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi, Minister of Food and Agriculture, said crisis could=

arise not only from political or civil strive but also from abuse of the environment through human activities such as bushfires, deforestation, pollution of the environment and water bodies to deprive the land of its ability to support plant and animal life for mankind.

He said crisis situation could arise from natural causes such as climate change, earthquake, floods and long periods of drought.

Mr Ahwoi called on Ghanaians to use the celebration as a rallying point in collaborating with farmers to promote and support the production, distribution and consumption of locally produced foodstuffs. He said for the medium term, Ghana had drawn a programme targeting six per cent growth in the agricultural sector that must be sustained for at least 10 years to ensure food security and rapid economic growth. Ms Maria Helena de Morais Semedo, Acting Director General and Regional Representative for FAO in a speech on her behalf, said the global economic crisis was stalking the small-scale farms and rural areas of the world, where 70 per cent of the world's hungry lived and worked. She noted that the current crisis was unprecedented in several ways, including a global rapid and sharp increase in staple food prices.

Ms Semedo said the recent downward adjustment should not be interpreted as the end of the food crisis, because in sub-Saharan Africa, 80 to 90 per cent of all cereal prices monitored by FAO in 27 countries remained more than 25 per cent higher than before the food price crisis began two years= ago.

She said in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, prices were monitored in 31 countries and between 40 and 80 per cent of cereal prices remained more than 25 per cent higher than in the pre-food crisis period. Ms Semedo said at the local level in some countries, prices for basic food products had not decreased at all, more production was still hampered by the increase in the cost of inputs 176 per cent for fertilizers, 70 per cent for seeds, 75 per cent for animal feed, making agriculture investment extremely difficult, and such increases made these vital inputs far beyond the reach of millions of farmers.