Tejas Kadia reports
World Food Day 2007 covered topics crucial to ending hunger — a worldwide teleconference on Climate Change and Food Security, the launching of the International Year of the Potato 2008, and new guidelines on the Right to Food. WHY staff took part in these events and will report on them under UN Involvement. Tejas Kadia reports on what was missing at one event.
Yesterday, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations held a meeting in observance of World Food Day at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) chamber of the UN Headquarters in New York. The event consisted of several brief statements by United Nations dignitaries including the FAO Director-General, the Minister of Agriculture of Peru, and the Chairman of the Board for the International Potato Center (CIP). Overall, their speeches were clichéd, uninspiring, and dispassionate.
The meeting lacked the sense of urgency necessary to combat hunger in a world where the number of malnourished is increasing each year. Consistent with the repetitive nature of the remarks, three of the six speakers mentioned that 854 million people are chronically malnourished. None dared question why this was the case. There was no mention about the fundamental failures of the market, unfair international trade policies which benefit huge agribusinesses at the expense of millions of small-scale farmers, or of the role of alternatives such as organic or biodynamic agriculture in restoring soil quality, and promoting sustainability.
The President of the 62nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly Mr. Srgjan Kerim, said, “If current trends continue, the world will miss the 2015 target by 30 million children who will have been going hungry. This is very concerning. It means that these children will not be able to develop their full potential.” Mr. Kerim was referring to the UN Millennium Development Goals target of “reducing by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015.” His remark was a great understatement.
The millions of children who go hungry are hovering between life and death. By providing these children with sufficient food, will they magically be able to develop their full potential? Of course not. While eliminating their hunger is the first priority, access to other basic needs and education is necessary for them to achieve their full potential. The UN Millennium Development Goal calls for reducing the proportion of people who are hungry. This means that the number of people who go hungry could increase by 2015, just as long as the new number is less in terms of percentage of the world population. This is unacceptable. And yet even achieving this goal is proving difficult.
Control of the global food system must be taken back by the people who work the land. We must reject chemically intensive agriculture and acknowledge that it is unsustainable and counterproductive to long-term food security. The disappointment of this meeting caused me to realize that the struggles for hunger eradication and food sovereignty go hand in hand. Grassroots movements are leading the way towards a more fair and sustainable food system — governments and institutions need to respond, and respond urgently.
