  Right to Food is the most fundamental of all human rights.
BY JAYA RAMACHANDRAN
IDN-InDepthNews Service
ROME (IDN) – If FAO director-general Jacques Diouf has his way with the heads of state and government from around the world, they will sign on to a global agreement to "completely eradicate hunger from the face of the Earth by 2025".
They will pledge the commitment in a declaration emerging from the world summit on food security Nov 16-18 in Rome. The goal of a world without hunger, they will declare, is in accordance with the principles proclaimed in the UN Charter – and the 'Right to Food’ is the most fundamental of all human rights.
A document circulated to governments of member states by the FAO secretariat pleads also for commitment to "secure sufficient, safe and nutritious food supplies for a growing world population that is projected to reach 9.2 billion in 2050".
The document builds on the G8 statement on food security -- emerging from the July 8-10 summit in L'Aquila, Italy -- which called for decisive action to free humankind from hunger and poverty by promoting sustainable production, increasing agriculture productivity, with an emphasis on private sector growth and smallholders.
The declaration proposed by the FAO director-general for the world summit on food security will state: "We recognize that the G8 'L’Aquila' Joint Statement of the Global Food Security . . . calling for the mobilization in three years of 20 billion U.S. dollar funds to allow small farmers to increase their production is an important step in the right direction. We call on the G8 members (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the U.S.) to ensure the full implementation and effective monitoring of this commitment."
If the FAO secretariat's concept prevails, the Rome global summit will plead for a new governance structure to achieve world food security, involving a high-level intergovernmental process of decision making with political legitimacy.
The November summit will be the third on food security since the creation of FAO in 1945, after those of 1996 and 2002. The document circulated by the FAO secretariat says the conference will take place "as we realize that the objective adopted by the ‘World Food Summit’ of 1996 of reducing by half, that is to say, to 420 million, the number of hungry people by 2015 at the latest is unlikely to be reached".
The document bemoans: "While the previous summits have contributed to keeping food and agriculture on the international agenda and making commitments to fight world hunger effectively, the decisions made were not followed by actions commensurate with achieving the goals set."
CHALLENGE
Subsequently, world hunger is increasing and global food security is facing the greatest challenge in modern history. Over 1 billion human beings in the world, mostly in developing countries, presently do not have sufficient food to meet their daily basic nutritional needs.
In fact, the number of hungry people in the world increased by several million in 2007 and 2008 as a consequence of high food prices. It is expected to go up by a further 105 million in 2009 because of the economic and financial crisis, which is affecting jobs and deepening poverty.
This is an alarming state of affairs because food security is central to poverty reduction, good public health, sustainable economic growth and world peace and security, as was witnessed in 2007-2008 with riots in 22 countries around the world, threatening government stability, the FAO document says. There are still 31 countries in the world in a situation of food crisis requiring emergency assistance, it adds.
Significantly, FAO is rather outspoken in analysing the current state of affairs: "The present situation has come about because, instead of tackling the structural factors of hunger, in recent decades the world has neglected agriculture in development policies."
MORE MONEY
FAO is concerned at the inappropriate level of financial resources made available for agriculture in developing countries and the lack of investment in this sector, which provides 70 percent of the world’s poor with their livelihood.
Development aid to agriculture decreased by 58 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2005, even though total official development assistance (ODA) commitments increased significantly during the same period. This means that the share of agriculture in total ODA fell from 17 percent in 1980 to 3.8 percent in 2006 and the same trends were observed in national budgets.
What is required now is to "act responsibly and address the root and multifaceted causes of food insecurity by adopting lasting political, economic, financial and technical solutions so that all people in the world can enjoy the ‘Right to Food’, which is the most fundamental of all human rights".
There is an urgent need, therefore, to reverse the declining trend of the share of agriculture in total ODA and particularly in lending portfolios of international financial institutions (IFI) and regional development banks.
The FAO chief Diouf would like summiteers to "call particularly for priority financing of agriculture in bilateral and multilateral resources and in IFIs and regional development banks’ lending, in the framework of the 2002 Monterrey Consensus and the 2008 Doha Declaration on Financing for Development through predictable and multi-year resource commitments".
The declaration will ask the developed countries to fulfil their commitments and achieve the corresponding ODA targets.
GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE
The document proposes elements of a new world food security governance structure. It also addresses issues of public and private investment for increasing agricultural production in developing countries, emergency food assistance, early reaction to food crises, trade and support to farmers, market instability, institutional and capacity building, food quality and safety, transboundary pests and diseases of plants and animals, as well as agriculture mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
The document points out that the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) could not fulfil the mission entrusted to it adequately at least for three reasons: (i) it has neither the political power nor all the scientific elements needed to tackle the short-, medium- and long-term problems of hunger in a satisfactory manner; (ii) it has no effective mechanism to follow up food security issues at national, regional and international level; and (iii) it lacks financial resources to exercise its mandate.
The CFS should therefore be revamped and strengthened as a system of governance of world food security. "The new CFS must serve as the global forum for debate and convergence on the causes and consequences of food insecurity and the ways to address them.
It should lay the principles for the formulation of appropriate policies and strategies and the means to monitor progress and to report to the FAO Conference and the United Nations General Assembly on their implementation, through the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)," the FAO documents adds.
For the CFS to be a high-level intergovernmental process of decision making with political legitimacy, FAO stresses the need for governments to be represented at the CFS meetings at ministerial level. While the representation to the CFS of relevant technical ministries and departments is important, the participation of the ministers of cooperation and development of member nations is also necessary to address important financing and economic issues of world food security, says the document.
FAO also pleads for the establishment of a High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) in the framework of the renewed CFS, to act as a scientific and technical platform for policy decisions and recommendations by supplying objective and impartial analyses.
The HLPE technical expertise should correspond to a multidisciplinary approach to food security and build on existing expert and advisory panels and intergovernmental sectoral technical committees, as well as on the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the global agricultural research system through the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
FAO further pleads for participation of all key actors -- including members of the UN System Chief Executive Board for Coordination (CEB) and in particular the Rome-based agriculture agencies, international and regional financial institutions, regional economic unions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, the private sector, farmers’ and agricultural trade associations, as well as humanitarian organizations involved in food and agriculture -- in the transformed CFS.
This would help ensure the mobilization and coordination of all stakeholders of the food chain, so as to assure the effective implementation of programmes. (IDN-InDepthNews / 31.07.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews Service
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