cathi c stegall

The World Bank and its sister organisation, the IMF have held a weekend of meetings that addressed rising food and energy prices as well as the credit crisis upsetting global financial markets. [4/13/08 bbc news article]

Well, according to my research, the United Nations met in 1970 and established the following priority, “Each economically advanced country will progressively increase its official development assistance to the developing countries and will exert its best efforts to reach a minimum net amount of 0.7 per cent of its gross national product at market prices by the middle of the Decade” (U.N., 1970). Even though these targets and agendas have been set…look at the stats, and you’ll see that year after year almost all rich nations have constantly failed to reach their agreed obligations of the 0.7% target.

BBC News just posted this article today, saying that

The rapid rise in food prices could push 100m people in poor countries deeper into poverty, the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, has said…

…”We have to put out money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths,” Mr Zoellick said. “It’s as stark as that.”

He called for more aid to provide food to needy people in poor countries and help for small farmers. He said the World Bank was working to provide money for seeds for planting in the new season.

Please tell me how this differs from the initial World Bank and UN meeting in 1970 and why it took a global crisis to actually re-address this critical issue?