World News Headlines...(16/10/08)

Charity Says 900 Million Starving

xfam's Double Edged Prices report found 967 million people were now officially living below the hunger line, because of the high cost of food.

It said there had been a 300% rise in the cost of wheat in Guatemala, a 100% increase in the price of flour and a doubling of the cost of rice in Cambodia and the Philippines in the past year.

Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking said the effects of the price rises were "devastating".

The charity said 1.7 million people in Tajikistan - one-third of the rural population of the country - is now classed as food insecure, after crops were devastated by a severe winter, followed by a hot spring and a plague of locusts.

In Honduras, food consumption among the poorest families has reduced by 8%, and in Cambodia 1.7 million people are facing starvation.

According to CARE International's figures, 6.4 million people in Ethiopia are in need of emergency food aid, and in Somalia half of the population is starving.

A combination of drought, conflict and rising food prices has left millions of people in the area facing starvation.

An emergency meeting of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome earlier this year pledged 12.3 billion US dollars to help tackle the world food crisis, but only one billion US dollars has been paid out from the fund so far, Oxfam said.

Charities condemned the slow response to the growing crisis, comparing it unfavourably with action taken against the banking crisis.

Ms Stocking said the contrast was "shocking", as the charity launched a £15 million appeal to help tackle the crisis.

"The international community has failed to organise itself to respond adequately to this," she said.

"Developing countries are being bombarded with with different initiatives and asked to produce multiple plans for different donors. We need to see one co-ordinated international response," she said.

Thai, Cambodian officials hold peace talks

Thai and Cambodian troops faced off at a disputed border as military officials held urgent peace talks Thursday, a day after a deadly gunbattle near an 11th-century temple sparked fears of war.

Thousands of Cambodian villagers living near the hilltop Preah Vihear temple fled their homes, fearing more violence. Families packed rice, clothes and chickens into cars, pickup trucks and carts pulled by motorized plowing machines, forming long convoys heading away from the border zone.

Senior military officials from the two neighboring Southeast Asian nations met in Thailand's Sisaket province, just across the border from Cambodia, to discuss the previous day's clash, which killed at least two Cambodian soldiers and wounded 10 from both sides.

To fight Taliban, US eyes Afghan tribes

Such a policy promises great risk and reward. Done carelessly, it could unleash the tribal and ethnic forces that led to civil war in the early 1990s, warns tribal leader Mr. Zahir, as well as analysts. Yet his experience – and that of aid agencies and local law-enforcement officials – suggests that tribal elders can often deliver results that the government alone cannot.

In a Pentagon briefing last week the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, said: "It seems to me that, with the lead of the government of Afghanistan, engaging those tribes and connecting them to governance – whether it's at the provincial level or the district level – seems to be a smart thing to do to assist with the security of a huge country."