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world
food summit 2002
Five
years later: what needs to be done
By Dr
Abid Qaiyum Suleri
The
UN's aim for halving the number of starving and malnourished
by 2015 would never be achieved unless current policy of
promoting industrialised agriculture is not reoriented
Poverty, inequality and food insecurity are the most crucial
and persistent problems being faced by humanity. Their
alleviation should be at the heart of any meaningful
development effort. It is realised that progress towards
elimination of poverty and food insecurity has generally been
far from satisfactory. Most commitments and targets
established by various international conferences in the course
of the past few years could not be met
At
the World Summit for Social Development, held in Copenhagen in
1995, participating countries committed themselves to the goal
of eradicating poverty "as an ethical, social, political, and
moral imperative of human-kind", and of eliminating severe
poverty within the first decades of the 21st Century. At the
World Food Summit (WFS), held in
Rome
1996, leaders from 186 countries made a solemn commitment to
halve the number of hungry people by the year 2015. However,
all these processes which are proclaimed to be a new
international consensus are no more than a collection of old
medicines.
The
cure is built on trust in market liberalisation, private
investment and modern technologies like genetic engineering
and high intensity confined animal production. The result is
an increasingly industrialised agricultural system, which is
also resulting in food insecurity as well as failures to
produce safe and high quality food.
Five
years ago at the WFS, FAO defined food security as "food that
is available to all times, that all persons have means of
access to it, that it is nutritionally adequate in terms of
quantity, quality and variety, and that it is acceptable
within the given culture".
Agriculture production, consumer health, nutrition, employment
and trade policy all affect food security. To ensure food
security entails a consideration of both national and
household levels of supply and distribution of, and access to,
food. It is a complex issue, which is often defined in
simplistic ways. The definition of food security as a
country's access to world market for food is deeply
inadequate, yet so widely accepted in some governments and
multilateral circles that many NGOs and farm organisations
have turned to other phrases to capture more precisely what
they mean by food security. For these organisations, building
food security by relying on imports paid by exports is a
problematic and risky strategy that forecloses the potential
of agriculture as an engine of development.
Thus,
the term "food sovereignty" has entered NGO vocabulary. Coined
by La Via Campesina (an international association of peasants
and small farmers from every continent) in its Tlaxcala
Declaration, food sovereignty introduces the element of
national decision-making into food security. The concept does
not mean self-sufficient production at the national level, but
emphasises the centrality of national decision making
structures in determining food and agriculture policy. The
role of trade in this strategy is left up to national
governments rather than to international trade bodies. The
concept calls for practical recognition of right to food as a
prime human right. The right to food was established in the UN
Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 and in several
internationally binding UN conventions, like the Covenant on
Economics, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) (1966) and the
convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Nonetheless, it
is important to secure this right in practice. It is also
necessary to strengthen the right through renewed national
commitments and also an optional protocol to the CESCR,
allowing for individual complaints.
The
world has enough food to secure the right to food for everyone
immediately. However, one wonders at the 800m people who are
starving and malnourished today. It is intolerable that 24,000
people die of starvation and hunger-related causes everyday.
The food rights activists from all over the world are
demanding that governments, the UN and other international
organisations operating on state level should take action for
ending the shameful and terrible situation of hunger and
malnutrition. This demands drastic changes in the current
policy. The UN's aim for halving the number of starving and
malnourished by 2015 would never be achieved unless current
policy of promoting industrialised agriculture is not
reoriented.
This
is exactly what was forwarded by the NGOs/CSOs who attended
the WFS in 1996 in the shape of a statement, "Profit For Few
Or Food For All". This declaration stated that the measures
and activities envisaged in the "Plan of Action" would not be
enough to achieve major steps towards reducing the number of
the hungry worldwide. Unfortunately, the civil society
analysis was correct. To date only a very small reduction of
the number of hungry persons, and perhaps not even that, has
been achieved. Indeed in a huge number of poor countries the
number of hungry people has increased. The FAO and the member
states have to concede that the implementation process of the
"Plan of Action" is slow and that the world is far from the
already modest objective of the 1996 WFS.
In
the current analysis presented to the Committee on World Food
Security, the FAO has identified two main obstacles for
improved implementation: 1) lack of political will and 2) lack
of sufficient financial means. While both observations are
correct description of missing elements for successful
implementation, one needs to ask whether more resources
invested in the same model of agricultural development within
the current global trade context would fulfil the WFS
objective, and that merely a bit more resources will be enough
to speed up the process. Specific importance has to be given
to the measures directed towards rural areas, as more than 70
percent of the hungry are living in rural areas. The
increasing neglect of rural areas by governments is critical
in this regard.
In
1996, the NGOs and CSOs proposed a model for achieving food
security based on decentralisation, and challenged the
concentration of wealth and power that now threatens global
food security, cultural diversity, and the very ecosystem that
sustains life on the patent. At the event of World Food Summit
five years later that started this week in
Rome,
it is widely realised that neither enough resources were used,
nor the Declaration and the Plan of Action from 1996 was
checked in the past for consistency because the text contains
contradictory recommendations. A full review of the reasons as
to why the main objective from 1996 to halve the number of
hungry people by 2015 has not been implemented must also
evaluate and challenge the current model of agricultural
development and trade in food.
The
international NGO-CSO Forum that is being held in
Rome
in parallel to the WFS has identified three central themes
which should be taken up more seriously and should become
central elements in the WFS follow-up process, if the intended
objective is to be reached.
* We
need a rights-based approach to hunger and malnutrition
issues. The aim should be to put the right to adequate food at
the centre of any activity for the implementation of the WFS
objectives by holding states accountable to the poor living
within their borders and by addressing the responsibilities of
actors other than States, such as intergovernmental
organisations or transnational corporations.
*
Subsidised exports, artificially low prices and WTO legalised
dumping of food are elements characterising the current model
of agricultural trade. This trade has a tremendous negative
impact on the majority of people living in rural areas:
traditional family farmers, indigenous communities, and women
and children. It is important to recognise the need to
guarantee farmer-led food sovereignty which offers farmers the
possibility of earning a decent income while limiting
corporate monopolisation of the food system.
* The
current model of industrialised agriculture, intensive animal
husbandry methods, and overfishing are destroying traditional
farming and fishing patterns and the variety of ecosystem that
sustain production on this planet. Agro-ecological model of
agriculture should become the dominant production model to
help sustain the cultural and biological diversity of our
planet as well as to create sustainable use of the ecosystem.
It is
time for the leaders of the international communities gathered
for WFS five years later, to commit that the right to food,
food sovereignty, and food security is a fundamental human
right.
*
Thus food sovereignty must be recognised and respected.
*
Farmers' rights should be operationalised and protected.
*
Far-reaching and genuine land reforms should be ensured.
*
Water is a common good and it should not be privatised.
*
Women should be given priority in the agriculture of
developing countries.
*
Rights of indigenous people should be respected and protected.
*
Biodiversity must be protected.
*
GMOs and other potentially destructive technologies must be
banned.
*
Desertification should be stopped.
*
Sustainable fisheries should be promoted.
*
Rich countries' dumping sales and export subsidies have to
stop.
* The
power of big corporations must be reduced.
*
Democratic governance and active participation should be
promoted.
Finally it should be remembered that peace is crucial. War is
a disaster for people in many ways, and also for the
possibilities to obtain food security. War and the effects of
war are destroying agriculture production and possibilities
for trade. The work for peace and peaceful settlements of
conflicts is crucial for the work for fulfilling the right to
food and to obtain food security.
(The
author is representing SDPI as well as the International NGOs
CSOs Forum on Food Sovereignt at the World Food Summit 2002,
Rome.)
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