(Corrects last name of U.S. ambassador in sixth paragraph.)

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- World governments need to invest $44 billion a year to end global hunger and achieve “food security,” Food and Agriculture Organization Director General Jacques Diouf said.

More than 1 billion people suffer from hunger, and another global food crisis like the one that led to record prices in 2007-2008 “can’t be excluded,” Diouf told a news conference in Rome today before the FAO’s food-security summit next week.

More than half of the $44 billion should come from already committed funds, Diouf said. Between 16 percent and 18 percent of Official Development Assistance, which totaled $119.8 billion in 2008 according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, should be invested in improving small and local farming in countries with grave hunger problems, Diouf said.

He said that about 2 billion people, or one-third of the global population, are small-holder farmers, and that supporting them would be “the most effective way to eliminate hunger from the face of the Earth.” Diouf will go on a 24-hour hunger strike on Nov. 14-15 in solidarity with the hungry, he said.

The FAO chief declined to say which funding areas should be reduced to make room for greater investments in food security, saying that decision is up to the main donor countries, led by the United States. Group of Eight nations in July approved $20 billion in aid over three years to help farmers in developing nations grow and sell food.

Self-Sufficiency

“We must have a strategy for how to help people feed themselves,” Ertharin Cousin, U.S. ambassador to the UN agencies, said in an interview in Rome yesterday. Only focusing on the immediate humanitarian need to feed the world’s hungry today “does not ensure that they can feed themselves tomorrow.”

Diouf listed areas for investment including irrigation, rural roads, water treatment, storage, food research, national research institutes, animal feed and institution building. To create food security and end global hunger, he said. Agricultural production must jump 70 percent by 2050, with developing nations boosting output by half in that period.

Diouf, who has headed the Rome-based United Nations agency since 1993, also warned of a possible repeat of the food-price crisis, which saw costs of some crops such as wheat skyrocket by more than 200 percent.

Food prices in 31 poor countries remain “stubbornly high despite a good 2009 cereal production,” FAO warned in a report yesterday. While prices have dropped from their peaks, “wheat and maize prices strengthened in October and rice export prices are still way above pre-crisis levels,” a statement accompanying the report said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeffrey Donovan in Prague at jdonovan26@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 11, 2009 10:09 EST