One hundred and nineteen million people are being pushed below the poverty line because of rising food prices across the globe, says Sami Zeidan, of al-Jazeera English, as he opens the second day of the News Xchange 2008 conference in Valencia. Are international broadcasters reporting the crisis properly?
The crisis is one of supply, says Rajat Nag, managing director of the Asian Development Bank over a video link from Singapore, which is ultimately a problem of crippling poverty.
The media should look at agricultural policy on a global scale while remembering that agriculture is about domestic politics, he says.
But for Vandana Shiva, director of the International Forum on Globalisation the problem is not only one of distribution, it's a more complex issue that also relates to the production of non-food crops for developed countries. The media, she says, needs to focus more on a failed model of production rather than just focus on the end result of starving millions.
Greater focus is also needed on the issue of climate change and agriculture, she says, because of the quantity of greenhouse gases created as a byproduct of the western model of food production.
Amy Barry, Oxfam head of news, asks why the media is suddenly focused on the food crisis? There were 840 million people hungry before June this year, she says, why were people not looking at the issue before?
She says there is a complex set of issues to cover, and asks if it could be that the attention of the world's media is also drawn by riots? A delegate from the audience asks if interest in the food crisis is also an interest in a security crisis where food is in short supply.
The problem is one of assumed audience expectation, says Tim Lambon, of Channel 4 News.
"There is a certain section of the editorial population that would rather see Amy Winehouse, that's why when food riots come up we use that as a vehicle to get the food crisis on television," he says.
There is also "compassion fatigue" - people are tired of hearing about starving children, says Emma Hurd, Sky News Africa correspondent.
She says repackaging the story by relating it to what is happening in the western world - for example, the rise in commodity prices - helps tell the story in a way that will appeal to audiences. However, the media has done less well reporting the underlying reasons for poverty.
She adds that the media has not focused on the aid given to developing countries by the developed world, and it has also not examined what influence donor countries have on the countries they help.
The assumption in the press has historically been the kind of thinking that says "all aid is good", she says.
"Why is so much mange tout grown in Kenya for UK consumption? Is that necessarily a good thing? Issues like this need greater focus," she says.
The extent of the food crisis is not well reported and as a result we don't see the complexity of the issues, she says. A delegate tells the forum during the Q&A that there will be food shortages in Somalia and Afghanistan but the world won't see pictures from it because access for cameramen is limited. Their attention is also focused more on warring factions than problems of food shortage, the delegate says.
Eli Flournoy, director of CNN's international newssource, says: "We have all become addicted to breaking news on a crisis like this."
He says media looks at a two-week window for an issue to have the attention of the world and says it's just not enough.
A new model of looking at these issues is needed, he says, rather than the media just hopping from crisis to crisis, which makes it difficult to focus on the overall picture of this, or any other long-running story.
