A United Nations expert said Thursday that increasing food production would not necessarily decrease the vulnerability of those who were food-insecure, dpa reported. Olivier De Schutter, the special rapporteur on the right to food, said that agricultural production should be designed to increase the incomes of the poorest, particularly small-scale farmers. "In responding to the global food crisis, it is easy to move from the symptom - prices which have suddenly peaked - to a possible cure - produce more, and remove as soon as possible all supply-side constraints," he wrote in a report to the Commission on Sustainable Development. This, he said would not benefit the small-scale farmers who were food-insecure and only serve further to marginalize them. "There is a risk that, in the name of raising production, the need for both socially and environmentally sustainable solutions will be underestimated," De Schutter wrote in the six-page submission. The expert, who took up his post during the food crisis last year, which saw prices of staple goods soar, said in a report in December that free trade and greater liberalization would not solve the problems of the nearly 1 billion hungry people in the world. "The current system of international trade is a major reason for (the food) crisis we've seen," he said then. Last month, agriculture ministers from the Group of Eight developed countries (G8), said the world was "very far" from achieving a UN commitment to halve the number of hungry people by 2015.
