The New Nation - Internet Edition

BSS, Dhaka

In order to combat rising food prices globally, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has undertaken an action plan to bring more lands under sustainable production, improve productivity by transferring technologies and practices and boost farm production and processing.

Besides, it planned to invest in agribusiness logistics and infrastructure with both the private and public sectors to help facilitate trade, lower costs, and reduce post-harvest waste and to improve water efficiency and irrigation infrastructure, the IFC in a recent report said.

Under the plan, the IFC will establish wholesale financing facilities with financial institutions, processors, and traders to increase rural access to credit and to develop and adopt modern financial instruments like warehouse receipts, crop insurance for agriculture.

The action plan of the IFC in response to rising food prices also includes increasing food safety and environmental sustainability by providing consumer-related investment and advisory services.

During the first three months of 2008, international prices of all major food commodities reached their highest levels in several decades, the report said adding that to help alleviate the crisis, IFC is leading the World Bank Group's efforts to engage with the private sector and find ways of increasing production.

Rising food prices are causing severe hardship for millions of people who are already affected by chronic hunger, and for the poor who now find themselves unable to buy food that they need for a healthy life.

This is provoking social unrest across the developing world and destabilising the economies of many countries, it added.

Any long-term strategy to stabilise food prices should include more agricultural production, the report said adding to help the situation, the IFC is providing investment and advisory services to the agribusiness sector of its member states, both directly to companies along the agribusiness supply chain and indirectly through intermediaries.

IFC's efforts complement the World Bank's public sector work on its proposed New Deal on Global Food Policy, endorsed by 150 countries.

The policy includes safety nets such as school meal programmes, food for work, and conditional cash transfers; an increase in agricultural production; a better understanding of the impact of biofuels; and actions on the trade front to reduce distorting subsidies and barriers.