Nations Vow Rapid Cooperation to Feed the Hungry

ROME, Italy, June 13, 2002 (ENS) - The World Food Summit: Five Years Later is ending with what United Nations officials see as positive results for global food security and sustainable development. Hosted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the summit sought to meet the challenge of feeding the world's 800 million hungry people.

Italian President Silvio Berlusconi and FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf of Senegal welcome delegates to the summit. (Photos courtesy FAO)

The government leaders renewed their global commitments made in the Rome Declaration at the World Food Summit in 1996 "to halve the number of hungry in the world no later than 2015, as reaffirmed in the United Nations Millennium of the Declaration." This requires a rate of hunger reduction of more than 22 million per year on average, they acknowledged.

The leaders are urging developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product as Overseas Development Assistance to developing countries, and 0.15 percent to 0.20 percent of GNP of developed countries to least developed countries, as reconfirmed at the Third United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries, they said in the Declaration.

In their Declaration, the leaders "stress" the need "to further promote sustainable forest and fisheries management, including sustainable use and conservation of aquatic living resources, in view of the contribution of those sectors to food security and poverty eradication."

The leaders underlined their support for the advancement of biotechnology, over the objections of critics who warn that genetically engineered crops will spread uncontrollably, making organic farming impossible, and fears of allergic and other public health reactions to transgenic foods.

Child in Ghana

In a parallel gathering, the leaders of grassroots organizations from around the world engaged in their own five day debate in Rome, the Forum for Food Sovereignty. "We have groups from 92 countries here, but we have consulted other organizations at meetings held around the world over the last year or two. We are proud of our reach," said Sergio Marelli, chairman of the Italian committee of nongovernmental and citizens organizations hosting the event.

"We want the governments to realize that what they have done is absolutely not enough to reduce by half the number of hungry by 2015," said Marelli. "This forum is an occasion when non-governmental and civil society organizations can discuss the issues, but the big work is to lobby governments in our own countries. This is what we do every day."

The NGOs take a rights based approach to hunger and malnutrition issues, and rely on agro-ecological models of agriculture instead of industrial models. They declared the importance of food sovereignty, or the right of people and countries to determine their own agricultural and food policies.

From left: Forum Chairman Sergio Marelli, Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni and FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. (Photo courtesy FAO)

In other summit results, 45 new countries signed the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, bringing the total number of signatories to 56, including 35 developing countries, 20 developed countries, and the European Union.

This binding international treaty provides for farmers rights, and establishes a multilateral system to exchange the genetic resources of some 64 major crops and forages important for global food security. It provides for the conservation of plant genetic resources, their sustainable use, and the equitable sharing of benefits arising from their use, including monetary benefits resulting from commercialization.

The FAO estimates humans have used some 10,000 species for food throughout history. Today, no more than 120 cultivated species provide around 90 percent of our food. Most of the biodiversity of these cultivated species has been lost in the 20th century, the FAO says.

At the summit, the World Bank announced a new strategy to promote rural economic growth in developing countries. The new strategy, "Reaching the Rural Poor," announced Wednesday at the World Food Summit, will guide the World Bank's rural lending operations to 2015 and beyond.

"Unless there is fast and broad-based rural development, we will not be able to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger," says Kevin Cleaver, Director of the World Bank's Rural Development Department. "Since 70 percent of the poor live in rural areas, the battle against poverty must be fought and won there."

Children eating lunch at a nursery school in Sri Lanka

The plan calls for stakeholder partnerships, progress towards trade liberalization, and an end to open and hidden agricultural taxation by developing countries.

The United States has called for more development aid to rural areas in poor countries. Alan Larson, U.S. under secretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs, called for "greater use of agricultural biotechnology."

Larson said that the summit has put "an appropriate" emphasis on the importance of trade in reducing poverty.

He defended the recently passed U.S. farm bill against criticism that subsidies to U.S. farmers in the legislation are unfair to other food producing nations. Larson said the farm bill keeps the United States within its World Trade Organization $19,000 million annual cap, or limit, on domestic support subsidies and adds a provision that allows the secretary of agriculture to cut supports off if they "bump up against" the cap.

He contrasted the U.S. cap with the European Union's cap of about $62,000 million and Japan's of about $30,000 million.

Italian President Silvio Berlusconi closed the summit this evening on a hopeful note. "We affirmed," he said, "and of many speakers repeated it, that the first good is freedom, freedom in all its forms, political freedom, religious freedom, the freedom of word, economic freedom but especially to be released from hunger. The right to adequate food surpasses all other rights. A man who is hungry is not a free man."