Geneva – United Nations Assistant Secretary General David Nabbaro said Thursday that the best way to prevent hunger and sustainably reduce poverty was to invest in agriculture.

“Over the last 25 years many countries have cut back on investment in agriculture,” he said.

Nabbaro warned that countries were finding it difficult to meet the UN’s Millenium Development Goals, including halving the number of hungry people globally by 2015.

The global economic crisis, which has hit poorer countries hard, will likely increase the number of people struggling to meet their basic needs, particularly as the world’s unemployment rate was expected to rise.

Nabbaro, the head of the UN’s task force on food security set up last year in the wake of the global food crisis which saw prices for basic goods soar, was speaking ahead of a meeting this weekend of the G8 agricultural ministers.

He also stressed the need to support small scale farmers.

“It is not appropriate to argue that only way to advance agriculture and grow enough food for the world in future decades is to create large industrial farming systems,” he said at the UN’s Geneva headquarters.

“Intensified small scale agriculture, with either cooperative working or better organization of producers through other methods, and much more efficient storage and processing of food close to farms, along with better market access, will have an enormous impact,” Nabbaro said.

Africa, he noted, had the capacity to increase its food production by three or four fold, if its used these methods.

Subsidies rich countries give to their farmers should not “work against people from one country being able to move their food into another country at a competitive rate,” Nabbaro said,

He estimated that over a third of the world’s population depended on small scale agriculture for its living. This was to rise as workers laid off as a result of the crisis returned to the land to sustain themselves.

China has already seen millions of workers return from large cities to the rural areas following the shutting down of factories when the market for exports started to dry up last year.

The drop in the cost of food off last year’s particularly high price tags was, however, coupled with an overall fall in commodity prices. Nations dependant on exports of these goods are seeing their income levels decline.

The World Trade Organization has predicted 2009 will see trade fall by 9 per cent, the largest drop since World War II.

Commodity producers will therefore see less income on fewer goods sold.

Concern remained, Nabbaro said, that there would be an upswing in food prices very soon. This might happen before the people hit by the crisis had a chance to recover.

The volatility in the commodity markets has made some farmers, even in industrialized nations, hesitant about planting, after failing to recoup investments made during the boom era. This was also expected to affect the food supply.(dpa)