Chile and Egypt will support Indonesia's initiative to take food crisis issues to a high-level UN meeting in September, Foreign Affairs Minister Hassan Wirajuda confirmed Wednesday.
During his keynote speech at a foreign policy seminar here, Hassan said the support was important because it was in Indonesia's interests to put the food crisis on the international agenda.
"The crisis has created a new geopolitics. ... It has also incited social unrest that threatens stability internationally," he said, pointing to a series of rallies in Haiti, Bangladesh and Egypt as examples.
Indonesia is in a credible position to propose to raise the issue of food at the UN General Assembly, as the nation is not currently suffering a crisis, Hassan said.
Hassan said a joint solution involving all countries is needed to mitigate the negative impact of the food crisis worldwide.
The crisis has already pushed up the number of poor people across the globe by more than 100 million, from 854 million to nearly one billion, he said.
A number of meetings to seek solutions to the crisis have already been held, including the High Level Conference on World Food Security in Rome two months ago.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also established a high-level task force to address the global food crisis. In March, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono wrote a letter to Ban demanding a special high-level meeting on food and energy security be held.
One step already taken was the creation of the Comprehensive Framework of Action (CFA), which contains an agreement by UN bodies to deal with the global food crisis comprehensively, Hassan said.
"But the CFA is not a 'one size fits all' blueprint that can solve all the food problems that each country is facing," he said.
One problem is that, internationally, the market appears to have been given full control over demand and supply, allowing speculators to play, Hassan said.
This meant the skyrocketing prices of food supplies -- which have increased by up to five times over the past 12 months -- were not seen as a problem by economically powerful countries.
"It is always developing countries that suffer the most from wealthy speculators," he said.
Apart from a discussion of investment in food and agriculture -- which still accounts for only 3 percent of the total global investment -- an international agreement on the use of food materials for bioenergy is also needed, the minister said.
He said there needed to be limitations on the shift in the use of food materials for bioenergy. A rational percentage, he said, would be 30 percent of the total global food supply.
"Morally it is contradictory if people starve in order to have enough energy," he said.
He said an international agreement was urgent because of the great temptation to shift to using agricultural produce for energy.
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