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DEVELOPMENT: Hunger Summit’s Failure Exposes Grim Reality
By Paul Virgo
ROME, Nov 17, 2009 (IPS) - There are two main ways the flop of this week’s United Nations World Food
Security Summit in Rome - which has been snubbed by the world’s top leaders,
has failed to deliver binding aid commitments, or to set a target date for the
eradication of hunger - is being read.
At best it reflects the limits of the U.N. and its flagship body in the fight
against hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), activists say.
At worst, they say it shows wealthy countries’ leaders lack the political will to
really to put their backs into solving a problem that - no matter how unjust
and scandalous, in a world with more than enough to feed everyone -
generally does not directly affect the voters who put them into office.
Either way it is probably bad news for the 1.02 billion people, almost one
sixth of the global population, who go to bed every night with empty
stomachs.
FAO Director General Jacques Diouf tried to make the best of it Monday after
the approval of a toothless declaration.
He pointed out consensus had been achieved on the need to end the long-
running decline in agricultural investment, which is one of the major reasons
many people in rural areas of developing countries struggle to feed
themselves.
But, Diouf admitted "regret" that countries had failed to commit themselves to
wiping out hunger by 2025 and that developed nations had not agreed to
allocate 44 billion dollars in aid to agriculture per year.
That figure sounds like an awful lot of money, but it was not such an
ambitious target if one considers other ways money is spent.
"Eliminating hunger from the face of Earth requires 44 billion dollars of
official development assistance (ODA) per year to be invested in
infrastructure, technology and modern inputs," Diouf told a news conference.
"It is a small amount if we consider the 365 billion dollars of agriculture
producer support in OECD countries in 2007, and if we consider the 1,340
billion dollars of military expenditures by the world in the same year."
Besides, Diouf was not suggesting rich countries shell out 44 billion in fresh
cash - much of the money could simply come by diverting already-assigned
resources to increase agriculture’s share of ODA from the current level of
around five percent to about 18-19 percent.
But the FAO does not have any battleships or financial sanctions to use to
coerce nations into taking action. Before the summit Diouf said that the FAO
budget does not permit it to do much alone about such a huge problem,
pointing out that individual states, the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the regional development banks are the ones with the serious
money.
Furthermore, a large portion of the hunger problem is related to unfair
international trade conditions - caused in part by First World support of
domestic agriculture - where the FAO has no role. It is up to the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) to engineer a deal to iron out these distortions.
The FAO can seek to keep food security on the international agenda and the
summit will have contributed.
But beyond that, it is basically a forum that is only as good or bad as the
member nations make it, which opens up questions about the political will of
the rich countries.
The summit was skipped by all but one of the leaders of countries in the
Group of Eight leading world economic powers - Italian Premier Silvio
Berlusconi, who only had to take a short drive from his office to reach the
FAO’s headquarters.
The G8 pledged to devote 20 million dollars to agricultural aid over the next
three years at the L’Aquila summit in July. So some believe the no-shows
here imply they want to implement their food security policies via G8 organs
or other bodies, such as the World Bank, which has frequently been accused
of infringing national sovereignty by trying to promote models of
development imported from the West that are not appropriate in poorer
countries.
"The absence of the G8 leaders is a clear message that the rich countries are
still trying to impose their policies on poor countries," said Sergio Marelli,
head of the association of Italian non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
"Agro-food policies and management of resources for their implementation
can only be the competence of the specialised United Nations agencies, above
all the FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and
should not be handed to the World Bank," Marelli said. "We believe assigning
the World Bank the role of policy-maker would mean giving it back to the
institution that has the greatest responsibility for the current food crisis."
Solomon Islands Agriculture Minister Selwyn Riumana was alarmed at
not seeing the likes of U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel in Rome.
"It’s normal when you get so many nations together that the result is a
compromise. You have to be realistic. But it is a great concern that G8
countries did not attend because in this world we share the same
environment, we breathe the same air, we are global family members and we
should be supporting each other," Riumana told IPS.
"We talk about democracy, institutional strengthening and good governance
and this is an area to put that into practise. Everybody participates at this
organisation, everyone feels part of it," Riumana said. "They must support the
FAO in this drive. It’s part of the United Nations. It was formed by these big
nations. This was their baby, where are they escaping to? They should give
milk to their baby."
But some see the missing leaders as an even more worrying sign - that the
wealthy nations are barely committed to tackling the problem at all.
"Obviously for those of us in developing countries the results of this summit
are a great failure," Julia Marlene Cconojhuillca Quispe of the Confederacion
Nacional Agraria del Peru told IPS.
"The G8 leaders’ absence shows definitively that they are not with the
peoples who really suffer hunger and who are often the ones who produce
food for the rich countries. They are clearly showing that they want to keep
the poorest marginalised," she stressed.
(END)
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