Will G20 Leaders Discuss Food Security?

Global development organizations are urging the leaders who will meet next week in Pittsburgh for the G20 Summit to seriously consider the economic concerns facing developing countries, especially food security.
Ritu Sharma, co-founder and president of Women Thrive Worldwide, says the number of people worldwide who go to bed hungry on a regular basis increased to nearly 1 billion over the past 2 years. Sharma says food prices soared 2007-08 and in many developing nations have not come back down. She said most families in developing nations spend 60 to 70% of their income on food.
Sharma says they were very pleased with President Barack Obama's pledge in July to provide $3.5 billion in U.S. aid for food security toward an overall global goal of $20 billion over 3 years...."and what we're particularly interested to see in the context of the G20 Summit, more discussion about how this plan is going to roll out, more commitments from some of the other developed nations."

Sharma says they want to make sure the international investments in agriculture reach the poorest of the poor...."what we don't want to see is these incredible commitments go to supporting large scale agribusinesses where the small scale farmers get kicked off their land and turned into migrant workers."

Sharma says the typical farmer in the world is not a white man on a tractor plowing 1,000 acres but rather a woman who is tending a plot of land the size of a 3-car garage and growing the food her family eats.