MANILA, Sept 19: The International Rice Research Institute (Irri) on Friday called for sustained global re-investment in agriculture to cut soaring food prices that it said have made 75 million more people hungry.

Elizabeth Woods, head of the Irri board, said at the end of a three-day meeting at the institute near Manila that “growth in agricultural productivity is the only way to ensure that people have access to enough affordable food.”

Woods also stressed that “achieving this is a long-term effort. A year or two of extra funding for agricultural research is not enough.

“To ensure that improved technologies flow from the research and development pipeline, a sustained re-investment in agriculture is crucial,” she added, according to a statement issued by the institute.

The meeting followed a spike in the price of rice, a staple food in some poor parts of the world, to more than 1,000 dollars a ton in May amid surging demand, falling productivity and natural calamities that devastated key rice-growing areas.

Although rice prices have settled to around 700 dollars a ton, this is still double the price of one year ago, the board noted.

It said the world needed a second Green Revolution to replicate the achievements of scientific breakthroughs between 1967 and 1990 that brought hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty.

Woods said the annual rice yield growth rate had dropped to less than one per cent in recent years, compared with 2-3 per cent during the Green Revolution years.

The institute cited a recent Food and Agriculture Organisation report that higher food prices were partly to blame for the number of hungry people growing by 75 million to around 925 million worldwide.

“The current crisis serves as a timely wakeup call for governments, multilateral organisations, and donors to refocus on agriculture,” the statement said.—AFP