DEVELOPMENT: Germany Declares 2000 ‘Year of Global Food Security’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Jan 13 2000 (IPS) - Germany’s development ministry, which this week declared 2000 the ‘year of global food security’, will work with multilateral organisations and regional development banks so that “everything is done” to alleviate hunger, according to a senior government official.

The official, Uschi Eid, who is Germany’s deputy minister for cooperation and development, says “ensuring global food security, so that 790 million people in the developing world do not have to go hungry, will be a focal point of the activities of our ministry during the year just begun.”

Germany’s move has been triggered by the nagging reality that 40 out of 100 inhabitants in Sub-Saharan Africa suffer from seasonal or chronic shortage of food. A similar fate is shared by some 450 million people in South and Southeast Asia.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the number of starving people in the developing world has declined by 40 million, compared to 1990/92.

Nevertheless, at the current rate of progress which involves a reduction of 8 million undernourished people a year, there is no hope of meeting the goal the World Food Summit had set itself in 1996 – halving the number of those who hunger by 2015, says FAO, in a recent report.

The report, ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World 1999’, further points out that the current reduction does not indicate uniform progress throughout the world.

Statistics show that, in the first half of this decade, just 37 countries achieved a reduction in the number of undernourished, totalling 100 million people. Across the rest of the developing world, the number of starving people increased by almost 60 million.

“Already now we have 790 million people who are affected by hunger,” says Eid. Things would get worse when the global population increases by nearly one billion to 6.79 billion in 2010, and when 7.5 billion human beings are registered on the planet in 2020.

According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), 97 percent of the world population increase takes place in the less developed regions. The population of Asia is increasing by 50 million every year, that of Africa by 17 million, and of Latin America and the Caribbean by nearly 8 million.

Africa has the highest growth rate among all major regions (2.36 per cent). Middle Africa, East Africa and West Africa have growth rates of 2.5 percent and over. Europe, on the other hand, has the lowest growth rate (0.03 per cent), with a negative rate of -0.2 percent in Eastern Europe.

This lends some urgency to the need to support rural development and provide for food security, deploying ‘clean’ technologies which take into account environmental considerations to protect the planet for future generations, Eid told journalists in Bonn this week.

Former capital of West Germany until unification nearly ten years ago, Bonn is being developed into a Centre for International Cooperation (CIC). So far, some national and international organisations as well as UN agencies have moved their headquarters to the city.

They include the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) and the secretariats of the U.N. Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) as well as the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Also the German ministry of economic cooperation and development remains in Bonn, though Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek- Zeul and her deputy Eid spend most of their time in Berlin, the capital of Germany.

Eid says any serious efforts to alleviate hunger must involve producing 50 percent more food – “and this should be done in the developing world, on the same area of cultivable land as is available now”.

In order to increase the food production, Eid says political conditions must be right. Decentralisation and the rule of law are also essential prerequisites, she adds.

She also calls for land reforms to free the farmers that till the land from uncertainty about ownership and empower women to inherit land. Eid says the right to land would be the subject of an international conference the German development ministry has planned for next year in Bonn. Participants will include representatives of developing countries as well as non- governmental organisations.

She also says global framework conditions should not put developing countries at a disadvantage. “The negative impact of the farm policy of the European Union is well known,” says Eid.

Her remarks came just one day ahead of the annual International Green Week beginning in Berlin. The event traditionally serves as a forum for focussing on the anxieties of German and other European farmers in a changing world.

The discussions often crystallise around lobbying for continuation of farm subsidies which actually run contrary to the objective underlying assistance for agricultural production in the developing world.

Eid says it does not suffice to concentrate on technologies which increase food production. Rural development and food security should be built upon the potential of the people in the developing world. With this in view, Germany’s development policy will make rural development the focal point of assistance for poverty alleviation, vows Eid.

During 2000, the ‘year of global food security’, the German development ministry will also draw international attention to the fact that the right to food is a human right.

“This does not mean, however, that political rights should be pushed to the background in the developing world; social and political rights must go hand in hand,” says Eid – echoing what the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson has been pleading of late.