Food crisis: CA woe

Central American presidents are due to hold a food crisis summit on Wednesday to discuss the region's vulnerability to a global rise in food prices.

Rising prices for rice and other staple foods have pressured governments to respond with measures to avert hunger and social unrest. Farm ministers from Central America, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela held talks in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua last month to boost corn, rice and bean production, as well as lifting output of the animal feed sorghum. Central America hopes to spend about $630 million to increase the region's food output and is looking to Venezuela, with its huge oil wealth, for financial assistance.

This is reinvigorating the claim that food security must come from self-sufficiency -- especially difficult for the region's low-income, food-importing countries.