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UNITED NATIONS

  • 14/01/1999
  • FAO

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has called upon various governments to closely work with the Convention to Combat Desertification, a body fighting for reversal of dryland degradation. "The most effective actions for preventing dryland degradation are often the same actions needed to protect biological diversity or minimise the risk of climate change,' said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP. He was speaking at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention in Nairobi, Kenya. Representatives of various countries are exploring ways to promote financial and technological support to programmes for combating desertification.

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has warned that the world financial crisis is threatening improvements in food security in Latin America and Asia. FAO said since the beginning of the decade, the number of people suffering from hunger in the world has grown, despite reduction in relative terms. According to a recently launched report on the state of world's food and agriculture, there are 828 million chronically-malnourished people in the developing world. The worsening of the situation was due to damage caused to harvests by climatic phenomena and foreign trade restrictions which ban importation of food, said the report.

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