Saarc Food Bank in the offing

The Saarc Food Bank is likely to be operational soon with the completion of ratification by the member states, reliable sources said.
So far, four member states of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (Saarc) -- Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka -- have ratified the declaration for establishment of the proposed food bank, according to a highly placed sources.
Now the declaration is awaiting the ratification by the other Saarc states.
The declaration for establishing a Saarc Food Bank was made at the last Saarc summit in India held on April 3, 2007.
Initially, the idea was to set up a Saarc Food Reserve. But later it was moved to a food bank considering the growing concern about the looming food crisis worldwide.
A diplomatic source said the Saarc food bank would start its operation with a food reserve of two million tonnes of rice and wheat. All the member countries will contribute to the reserve.
The food will remain in respective storage of the member nations as food stock, which will be designated as Saarc Food Bank.
The idea of Saarc Food bank is that whenever a country of the Saarc faces food shortage, it will have a scope to take food from the designated storage of its own country to face the emergency crisis. If such food is not sufficient to meet its demand, the member country will have an access to take more food from neighbouring Saarc country' s designated storage as loan.
For using the food from the Saarc Food Bank, the member countries will not have to pay anything. “The country taking food loon from Saarc Food bank will have to just return the food to the storage after the crisis is over,” said the source.
He mentioned that initially, a Saarc Food Security Reserve was established few years back, but that was not operational because of its complicated process and hard conditions.
He said one of the main conditions to utilise the food from the security reserve was to declare national emergency by the member-state. But no government of the member states was found to be willing to declare emergency to utilise the food.
“But when the Saarc chairmanship came to Bangladesh, we took a lead to make it effective and operational by bringing some changes in the conditions. We wanted to relax the procedures and even provide a scope for private sector's participation,” said the Bangladeshi diplomat wishing anonymity.
“After our initiative, the Saarc Food bank got full-fledged support in the Delhi Saarc Summit and we're hopeful, the ratification to the food bank by the remaining member countries will be completed within three to four months,” he added.
The need for an effective and operational regional food bank came to the spotlight after the recent worldwide food crisis and rising trends in the prices of rice and wheat.