The race by food-importing countries to secure farmland overseas to improve their food security risks creating a "neo-colonial' system, the United Nations' top agriculture official has cautioned.

The warning by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, comes as countries from Saudi Arabia to China plan to lease vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia to grow crops and ship them back to their markets.

Flooding and poor harvests have caused North Korea's worst food crisis since the late 1990s and have put millions at risk, the United Nations' food agency said Wednesday.

The food shortage threatens widespread malnutrition, the World Food Program said.

"Millions of vulnerable North Koreans are at risk of slipping toward precarious hunger levels," Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP's country director for North Korea, told a news conference.

Ministers from about 35 countries have failed to make a breakthrough in the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Doha round to open up global trade.

Talkd to broker a new global trade pact have collapsed because key powers are unable to bridge their differences on food tariffs, the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) says.

"There is no use beating around the bush, this meeting has collapsed, members have simply not been able to bridge their differences," WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said.

V. Jayanth

Calls for global partnership to save the poor; "Act immediately to boost agricultural output'

CHENNAI: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the "double jeopardy' of high food and fuel prices threatened to undermine much of the progress made in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Critical challenges

MILLIONS of Zimbabweans face starvation after the widespread failure of the latest harvest brought on by the Government's mishandling of land redistribution, and shortages in the shops caused by hyperinflation.

The United Nations said hundreds of thousands of people required food aid immediately because they had harvested little or nothing in recent weeks.

It has warned that up to 5 million will need help in coming months

Hundreds of millions of people will still not have access to sanitation by 2015 as the UN's Millennium Development Goals are "badly off track' on this topic, the World Health Organisation warned Thursday.

"We are badly off track' to meet the MDG on improvements in sanitation, WHO coordinator for water, sanitation and health Jamie Bartram told journalists in Geneva.

The UN agencies and various NGOs are facing major shortfall in resources to respond to growing global food shortages and environmental disasters.

THE Government's green paper on carbon trading uses adjectives like "smoother", "gradual", and "measured" to describe the scheme's implementation, because cutting Australia's emissions by 60% in four decades is going to produce profound structural change, and, inevitably, political repercussions. Like a dentist poised above you, drill in hand, the Government wants to warn us the process will be difficult and reassure us it will be no more painful than is necessary.

The United Nations yesterday launched a 33.5 million dollar appeal to aid relief efforts in southwest China where a magnitude-8.0 earthquake on May 12 left nearly 70,000 people dead.

"It is the hope of the United Nations and the international community that China will quickly recover from this enormous tragedy," Khalid Malik, UN resident coordinator in China, said in a statement.

The appeal will address the needs of the poor and vulnerable among the affected population, who are trying to rebuild after having survived the devastating earthquake, the statement said.

A global report card on nations doing the most, and least, to clean up the environment.