POPULATION: Groups Worried About a Food Summit Sans Population

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 14 1996 (IPS) - Advocates of population stabilisation and reproductive health are concerned that these issues will be shut out of next month’s World Food Summit in Rome.

“If you are going to discuss food without population, it is like discussing fish without water. One cannot exist without the other,” Hugh O’Haire of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told IPS.

“Food is produced for human beings,” O’Haire added. “How can you talk of food without population?”

O’Haire and others were reacting to a statement suggesting population issues should not be delved into at the Nov. 13-17 conference. The statement was attributed to Jacques Diouf, director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the summit organiser.

Pope John Paul II is expected to open the Summit. Some analysts say this is responsible for resurgent controversy over references to population growth in draft documents to be finalised and adopted at the conference.

Sources close to the negotiations, however, say the population issue is a bargaining chip in larger negotiations between the ‘Group of Seven’ (G-7) industrialised countries and the ‘Group of 77’ (G-77) developing countries.

Delegates at the Summit are expected to adopt a ‘Rome Declaration’ reaffirming their commitment to the principle of ‘food for all’ and a ‘Programme of Action’ or guide to fulfilling this promise.

Passages in the draft documents remain in brackets, however, signalling that compromises on wording have yet to be negotiated. Many brackets have fallen in the past week, sources say.

Still up for grabs are references to the need to “fully integrate population concerns” into efforts to end hunger and promote sustainable development, and the importance of reproductive health services for women, who make up the majority of agricultural workers almost everywhere.

Seeing the threat that language agreed to in Cairo, at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), might be ignored in Rome, UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik is asking several U.N. member states to “intervene” to rectify the anomaly.

“UNFPA’s concerns relating to the World Food Summit at this point centre on the possibility that the experts on food in attendance at the Preparatory Committee meeting (leading up to the Rome Summit) as negotiators may not be fully in the picture on the prevailing levels of international and intergovernmental agreement in the area of population,” she says in a letter.

UNFPA’s fears were heightened by Diouf who, according to a wire service report, “said he did not want the summit to address an issue that has steeped other U.N. conferences in controversy.”

“I hope that we will not reopen the debate into what has already been decided at the Cairo conference. This (summit) is to supplement what has already been decided,” Diouf was quoted as saying.

At Cairo, a group of rich and poor nations rallied around the Vatican in pushing abortion and other reproductive-health issues to centre stage. Diouf and senior officials at FAO have made it clear they want their summit to focus more narrowly on subjects pertaining to the production and distribution of food precisely to avoid heated exchanges that might otherwise blow marginal issues out of proportion.

But to the population community, the issues at stake are not marginal. In ‘Food for the Future: Women, Population and Food Security,’ a study released last month, UNFPA says that as a first step, women’s reproductive rights must be recognized.

Women, the study says, “need reproductive health care in all its aspects, as a basis for choice in all areas of life. As food producers and providers, women need equal access to education and training, extension services, technologies and credit, and equal rights to land tenure and inheritance.”

In her letter to U.N. member states, Sadik says that “certain inaccuracies on population terms at the Preparatory Committee meetings, in the process of hurried informal consultations, might have perhaps failed to capture the careful balance of the agreed official Cairo language, and contributed to the lack of an understanding of the post-ICPD scenario during working group negotiations.”

“This could have been fueled by the aggressive propaganda from certain population non-governmental organisations (NGOs) not best known for their support of developing country problems,” she adds.

Yet in this case, the developing countries themselves appear to oppose the population lobbyists.

U.N. officials and observers from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) say G-77 members have reversed their position since the Cairo conference, at which they came out in strong support of population stabilisation and reproductive health goals.

To some degree, they say, this may be simply because there are few population officials on government delegations to the Rome summit.

More likely, population, which is being pushed by the G-7 rich nations, is being used by the G-77 to leverage concessions on key issues including fair trade, access to technology, environmental safeguards, and equitable social development.

“Many developing countries do back the Cairo language, but they’re not willing to split the G-77 in the midst of running disputes with the G-7 over issues they consider far more pressing,” said one analyst who has closely followed the formal negotiations and the work of the informal drafting committee.

Meanwhile, some 200 NGO representatives last month issued a statement that “governments must promote policies which facilitate the productive and reproductive roles of women and men through better access to education, credit, technology, infrastructure and basic health care, including reproductive health care and family planning services.”

The NGOs also want structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) renegotiated to ensure universal access to land, water, sanitation, food, and nutrition; debt cancellation, especially for the least developed countries; and acknowledgement that international trade liberalisation often exacerbates food insecurity.

“Food security is a human right which must take precedence over macroeconomic and trade concerns, militarism, and the dictates of the marketplace,” the groups stated.

For Bob Engelman of the Washington-based Population Action International (PAI), population must feature prominently in the Summit documents, or it “will not be taken seriousl~.”