DEVELOPMENT: CALL FOR A 'NEW WORLD AGRICULTURAL ORDER'
Ramesh Jaura
BERLIN (IPS/TVE) - The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has called for a global summit to design a "new world agricultural order" and find 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate hunger "once and for all".
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf appealed to world leaders Nov. 19 to meet together next year to "correct the present system that generates world food insecurity on account of international market distortions resulting from agricultural subsidies, customs tariffs and technical barriers to trade".
The distortions also resulted from "skewed distribution of resources of official development assistance and of national budgets of developing countries", Diouf said emphasising the need for a new world agricultural order.
"After more than 60 years (since FAO's foundation) it is essential to create a new system of world food security," Diouf told a special session of the FAO's 191-member-nation governing conference (Nov. 18-22) in Rome.
The Summit, proposed for the first half of 2009, "should lay the ground for a new system of governance of world food security and an agricultural trade that offers farmers, in developed and developing countries alike, the means of earning a decent living," he said.
"We must have the intelligence and imagination to devise agricultural development policies together with rules and mechanisms that will ensure not only free but also fair international trade," the FAO chief said.
The Summit should also "come up with 30 billion dollar per year to build rural infrastructure and increase agricultural productivity in the developing world," Diouf said.
Proposing to commit such a sum to save humanity from hunger was not unreasonable given the fact that it had taken only few weeks to find more than 100 times that amount to deal with a global financial meltdown.
The amount was modest compared to 365 billion dollars of total support to agriculture in the OECD countries in 2007 and 1,340 billion in world military expenditure the same year by developed and developing countries, Diouf said.
Late last month at the World Food Day celebration in New York, attended by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon, and earlier this month in his message of congratulations to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, Diouf suggested that the United States take a lead in convening the Summit.
At the proposed Summit, state and government heads should also agree to create an 'emergency intervention fund' to provide rapid-reaction resources to boost food production in poor countries heavily dependent on food imports, Diouf said.
To boost international food security, Diouf suggested building on the present Committee on World Food Security (CFS) created in 1974 after the World Food Conference to monitor the international food situation. "As an intergovernmental mechanism, the CFS is universal and is open to all member nations of FAO and the UN and to representatives of other international organisations, NGOs, civil society and the private sector," he said.
Specifically, the CFS' role would be to prevent international food crises and help develop and implement the necessary policies at national, regional and international levels to ensure food security in the world. It could also act as a forum for debate on the pro-security principles that should govern the international agricultural system.
One of its tasks would be to analyse future risks and needs and formulate appropriate policy recommendations. It should be enhanced as a system for coherence in the governance of world food security.
The CFC It should include a "global partnership for food security" building on existing alliances and an international panel of top-ranking experts comprising existing external advisory panels of experts in crop, livestock, fisheries, forestry and socio-economic aspects of food and agriculture, possibly along the lines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Diouf stressed that FAO knew very well what had to be done to eradicate hunger from the world and to double world food production by 2050 to feed a population of nine billion. "Plans, programmes and projects to resolve the problem of food insecurity in the world do exist," he underlined. Achieving those goals was a political and funding problem rather than a technical one, he said. (END)
