MONTREAL – The decade-old promise to cut world hunger rates in half by 2015 can happen despite dismal results since the pledge was made, says Canada’s international development minister.
“I’m very optimistic,” Bev Oda said in an interview after a speech to a McGill University conference on global food insecurity, citing increased co-operation and co-ordination between countries as a means to meet the challenge.
The commitment, called the Millennium
Development Goal, was to reduce the number of chronically hungry from its 2000 level of 800 million to 400 million in 15 years.
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In the decade since, the number of starving or chronically hungry has risen to more than 900 million and last year for the first time, topped one billion before falling in 2010 to more than 925 million.
But Oda, minister responsible for Canada’s food aid and development spending through the Canadian International Development Agency, said the world finally has focused on the commitment and its achievement is possible.
The food price spike in 2008 that added tens of millions of people to the world’s hunger index also galvanized the commitment to tackle the problem, she said.
Oda told the conference that a recent United Nations meeting on the hunger-reduction pledge gave her hope.
“Never before in the history of international efforts had so many development partners been aligned in their commitments, in their pledges for accountability and their willingness to look to innovation and concrete actions to reach the (Millennium Development Goal) by 2015,” she said.
While many development officials insist the goal of reducing the army of under-nourished people by more than 500 million in the next five years is impossible, Oda’s optimism received support from a high-level United Nations official.
David Nabarro, special representative for UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon on food security and nutrition issues, opened the McGill conference Oct. 19 on the same optimistic note.
His speech was filled with bureaucratic jargon about high-level task forces and international committees but at its core, Nabarro insisted the hunger-reducing goal can be met.
This year’s estimate of 950 million hungry people “is far too high and way below what is necessary for the realization of the first Millennium Development Goal,” he said.
“But changes are in the wind. We’ve seen a reverse in the negative trends in agriculture investment, we’ve seen governments giving increasing priority to hunger reduction and nutrition as priority development outcomes.”
Nabarro noted that as a result of a 2009 international leaders’ meeting in Italy, $22 billion has been pledged by rich nations and international organizations to deal with food insecurity issues.
He said the Canadian government has been leading the way in demanding that countries meet their pledges, tailor help to support country development plans and account for the funds spent.
