INTERVIEW-Arab protests show hunger threat to world-economist
* Hunger seen leading to growing world instability
* Rich world must keep promises on food security
By Mark John
DAKAR, Feb 12 (Reuters) - Uprisings across the Arab world are just a foretaste of the instability facing other poor states unless a global food crisis is tackled, leading development economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Saturday.
Popular anger at rising food prices has been an explosive ingredient in the mix of grievances that triggered the fall of leaders in Egypt and Tunisia, and is now putting the heat on authorities in Algeria and Jordan.
Sachs, a long-time adviser of governments and world agencies on the fight against poverty, said the root causes applied right across an already unstable belt of states stretching from Iraq through the Sahara to the shores of West Africa.
"This isn't just about the Muslim Brotherhood and it isn't just about politics," Sachs said in an interview of what he called an overly narrow concern among some in the West on the current mood benefiting the influential Islamist group.
"This is about hunger, about poverty, about food production about a change of world economy. ... This is one large swathe of 10,000 miles of potential instability," said Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute in the United States. Continued...
