NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 17: The world may achieve its Millennium Development Goals for Human Development, but the targets for attaining global food security are unlikely to be met, according to a senior official from the Food and Agriculure Organisation (a UN body leading efforts to fight global hunger).

Speaking on the potential of biotechnology to help meet global food security needs, the FAO’s director of plant production, Shivaji Pandey, also castigated India for its chronic neglect of agriculture since the 1980s and said the country would not have needed to pay the extremely high price of $350 per tonne of wheat as it is doing now if it had invested in agriculture like China did.

Pointing to rising food prices across the world—11 per cent in India and 30 per cent in Italy last year, for instance— Pandey said the trend was unlikely to change in the future as more and more farmers switch to biofuels from food crops. Arguing that the answer to national and global food security “does not lie in WTO negotiations” but in “providing support to your farmers and prioritising investments in agriculture,” Pandey stressed that given the right support, farmers would be able to produce all the food a country needed.

Taking a dig at India’s current predicament over wheat imports, Pandey added, “You won’t have to depend on other countries for food, you won’t have to pay $350 a tonne for wheat that you are paying now. You have to respect and support your farmers, not insult and injure them.

The countries you are now paying $350 for a tonne of wheat, are the ones that have invested in agriculture.”