Climate change, the secretary-general told the president, "is a priority for the United Nations and for whole international community. I am going to focus and work together with the leaders of the world to address this issue, to unlock all this massive investment for the green economic recovery, and also to save our planet. This is an issue of our era."

The "United Nations stands ready to work together with you, Mr. President, to make this make-or-break year turn into make-it-work, full of optimism and resolution," Ban added.

Officials in the UN system working on climate change previously had hailed the Obama administration's willingness to work with them on the problem.

At a Rome meeting in June 2008, policy makers said reaching global food security in light of the impact of climate change may be one of the biggest challenges the planet faces in this century. More than 860 million people in the world suffer from hunger. Of those, about 830 million live in developing countries, the very countries expected to be most affected by climate change.

During the three-day UN Food and Agricultural Organization's High-Level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bio-energy at the FAO's Rome headquarters, heads of state and government, high-level ministers and non- governmental and civil society organizations called on the international community to increase assistance for developing countries, in particular the least developed countries and those most adversely affected by high food prices.

There was general agreement agriculture would play a prominent role on the international agenda and that increased agricultural investment and enhanced agricultural productivity would be crucial. Did the diversion from agricultural production to biofuels cause the spike in food prices? Not solely, the experts said, but it was a big part of the problem.

The IMF blamed several factors.

It said, "Strong food demand from emerging economies, reflecting stronger per capita income growth," accounted for much of the increase in consumption. "The recent sustained period of high global growth contributed to depleting global inventories, particularly of grains."

Rising bio-fuel production added to the demand for corn and rapeseeds oil, in particular, spilling over to other foods through demand and crop substitution effects, the Washington-based institution said.

"Almost half the increase in consumption of major food crops in 2007 was related to bio-fuels, mostly because of corn-based ethanol production in the United States; and the new bio-fuel mandates in the United States and the European Union that favor domestic production will continue to put pressure on prices," the IMF said.

Other factors the fund cited were that supply adjustment to higher prices was slow, notably for oil, and inventory levels in many markets declined to the lowest levels in years.

Policy responses in some countries exacerbated the problem, the fund said. Those policy problems included major exporting countries introducing export taxes, export bans, or other restrictions on exports of agricultural products and some importing countries not allowing full pass-through of international prices into domestic prices.

Drought conditions in major wheat-producing countries such as Australia and Ukraine, higher input costs, as for animal feed, energy, and fertilizer, and restrictive trade policies in major net exporters of key food staples such as rice also contributed to the situation, the IMF said.

Other financial factors included the depreciating U.S. dollar increasing purchasing power of commodity users outside of the dollar area; falling policy interest rates in some major currencies reducing inventory holding costs and inducing shifts from money market instruments to higher-yielding assets such as commodity-indexed funds.

Advanced negotiations are to get underway on March 29 in Bonn in preparation for the Copenhagen meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) beginning Dec. 7. The December meeting is to agree on what can be done to reduce warming of the planet.

The 1994 UNFCCC was ratified by 192 nations and is nonbinding. The follow-up 1997 Kyoto Protocol was ratified by 184 countries, went into effect four years ago and is binding. It sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The reductions amount to an average of 5 percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.

(Xinhua News Agency March 17, 2009)