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A World Without Hunger - Still a Distant Dream By Jorge Piña ROME, Jun (IPS) - The current pace at which the number of hungry people in the world is being cut - by eight million a year - is not fast enough if nations are to make good on their pledge to reduce the number of undernourished people to half the 1996 total of 800 million by 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned .. At the UN agency's headquarters in Rome, the members of FAO ratified their commitment to that goal, which was agreed at the World Food Summit here five years ago. FAO has convened a new world conference for Nov 5-9, at which heads of state and government are to assess the advances made thus far and discuss how to make the dream of a world without hunger come true. The representatives of 119 nations meeting at the 27th period of sessions of FAO's Committee on World Food Security pledged to reinforce the political will to reach that goal. FAO's Assistant Director-General Hartwig de Haen blamed the slow progress in meeting the target on both rich and poor countries, but affirmed that everyone was willing to step up the pace. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, which affects 35 million people today, ''is not only a human tragedy, but has a very significant impact on the economic and social system, especially in Africa, and has translated into a huge risk for food security,'' De Haen told IPS. FAO estimates that seven million rural workers have died of AIDS since 1985 in the 27 African countries hit hardest by the disease, while it predicts another 16 million deaths over the next two decades. The committee recommended that FAO support its member countries in their efforts to curb the pandemic, and to mitigate its effects on food security and nutrition. The delegates meeting in Rome decided not to reopen the debate on the targets agreed in 1996, but to push harder for compliance, said ambassador Juan Nuiry from Cuba, the country that currently presides over the Group of 77 (G-77), a bloc of 131 developing nations. November's summit must make it clear whether the will and the funding exist to reach the goal of cutting the number of undernourished in half, said Nuiry. ''There is money to invest in space defence systems, but not to address tragedies on earth,'' he remarked. So far, the objectives set by FAO have not been met due to flagging political will, added the Cuban diplomat, who pointed out that the intolerable burden of the external - or ''eternal'' in his words - debt had not yet been resolved, while food continued to be used as a tool of political pressure. Some 60 million people in 35 countries faced food emergencies of varying intensity as of last March. The most severe cases were found in sub-Saharan Africa, while serious problems persisted in Afghanistan, Mongolia and North Korea. FAO estimates that 174 million children under five suffer malnutrition in the developing world, over two-thirds of whom live in Asia. The next largest proportions are in Africa and Latin America. The chairman of the commission that drafted the final document adopted by this week's meeting, Roberto Gerbasi, reported that the Committee on World Food Security decided to determine the political causes and funding shortages responsible for the failure to make adequate progress towards cutting hunger in the world in half. The meeting that concluded Friday ''laid the groundwork for the next summit,'' said Gerbasi. The developing countries represented at the meeting reiterated their call for wealthy nations to increase official development aid to 0.7 percent of gross domestic product, as pledged in 1970. That proportion currently stands at just 0.24 percent. They also underlined that agriculture must be a priority for multilateral financing, given that 70 percent of the poor live in rural areas. In addition, developing countries must earmark a greater portion of their budgets to farming, said Gerbasi. Developing countries back the creation of a fund that would contain at least 500 million dollars in voluntary contributions to go towards development projects, proposed by the FAO secretariat. A task
force will put the final touches to that initiative and present
it at the November summit. The Committee for World Food Security
also recommended that FAO send an urgent investigative mission to
Palestine to evaluate food security there and suggest immediate
and long-term solutions. (END/IPS) |
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