ROME – Former United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali opened a UN agriculture and food conference late last week with a ringing slogan for the new millennium. “Hunger is as unacceptable as war,” he said.
The delegates from close to 180 Food and Agriculture Organization member countries gave him a warm reception, many of them standing.
So why, then, do they so readily accept widespread hunger?
Hundreds of millions of people in the world are hungry and yet the main political drive of many food-rich countries, Canada among them, is to try to reduce “artificial” production promoted by subsidies.
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Many of the FAO food-rich agriculture ministers who applauded Boutros-Ghali’s call to arms believe the current problem is not too little food but too much, produced with too many subsidies, driving down market prices and making farmers like prairie grain producers suffer.
They are preparing to go to Seattle to begin the World Trade Organization struggle to reduce “production-distorting subsidies” so production is more in line with market demand.
On the eve of the millennium and the WTO talks, perhaps a food reality check is in order. FAO world food reports published this week are the reference points.
If the issue is whether people are being fed, rather than whether farmers are making money, there is not a surplus of food in the world. The FAO estimates that just under 800 million people live in a constant state of malnutrition.
Sometimes it is because of human conflict, sometimes government policy and sometimes natural weather catastrophe. Whatever the cause, they still are hungry for reasons beyond their control.
“Although there are indications that the number of undernourished people in the developing countries is on the decline, the number of countries facing food shortages worldwide … stands at 35, the highest since 1984 when a severe drought hit sub-Saharan Africa on a large scale,” the FAO reported Nov. 15.
People are starving. People are hungry. Lethargic, hungry people do not build better countries or a better world.
But how can the incredible food-producing capacity in the developed world be matched to the need in the food deficient world? It surely cannot be the responsibility simply of individual farmers, who must make a living and cannot give their produce away.
Enter governments.
The answer is not simply to dump surplus food into deficient markets. That destroys local farmers.
Still, governments have the ability to purchase food locally to send to those most in need. Instead, the FAO reports the opposite has been happening. Since 1995, food aid shipments have been consistently below the need.
“It is evident that donor response to appeals for resources needed for rapid rehabilitation of food production following disasters is increasingly diminishing,” said the FAO.
While governments of rich countries fight over who is producing too much market-distorting food, close to 800 million wonder where the food is.
In food-rich countries, where is the political will to walk the talk that “hunger is as unacceptable as war?”
