SASKATOON – World leaders who gather in Rome late this year to debate food security issues will be presented with what one United Nations official suggests may be a “last chance” to make food policy an international priority.
“I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to organize something like this again,” said Hilmi Toros, a spokesperson for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “This may be the last of its kind.”
It will not be a conference at which nations will be asked to make specific commitments of more resources for the food and farm sector or international aid funds.
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Instead, heads of state from more than 100 countries will be asked to sign a declaration committing their governments to support domestic policies that help rural areas, increase food production and give their consumers more access to food imports.
They will also be asked to promise continued support to the international fight against hunger.
According to FAO documents being prepared for the Nov. 13-17 conference, countries have an option. They can allow the present policy drift of rural depopulation, poverty and falling aid resources to continue or they can commit themselves to policies like freer trade, creation of strategic food reserves, rural development and population control aimed at reducing hunger.
The first option would lead to greater suffering, says an FAO plan being developed for the conference.
“By 2010, an estimated 700 to 800 million persons worldwide would still be chronically undernourished.”
The alternative is active support from world governments, which would help the world reach a more humane goal, says the UN food agency.
Improve outlook
“The world food summit is based on the conviction that tested, practical solutions and actions at local, national and international levels can alter dramatically this grim scenario.”
The FAO will be suggesting that governments commit themselves to some practical policy positions:
- Put food security for their own populations and the world at the top of policy priorities.
- Be prepared to invest over the next decade as much as $500 billion worldwide in the farm and food sector to build infrastructure, upgrade equipment and give farmers the tools they need to increase production by 75 percent over the next three decades.
- Liberalize trade to give farmers market access and also to make affordable food imports available to urban populations.
- Commit themselves to create by decade-end “adequate and cost-effective strategic emergency food security reserve policies” nationally and internationally. In the past, debates over food reserves always have broken down on the issue of where they would be stored, who would manage them and who would pay for them.
- Improve, rather than reduce, international commitment to respond quickly and generously to emergency food crises.
- Agree to create a better “early warning system” that will alert world governments to developing crises.
