Italy/hunger summit

FAO chief regrets lack of commitments on world hunger

Article published on the 2009-11-17 Latest update 2009-11-17 09:37 TU

Delegates at the Food and Agriculture Organisation Food Security Summit in Rome, 16 November 2009
(Photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) criticised the lack of concrete figures or dates to eradicate hunger at a summit in Rome. A declaration released Monday on the first day of a three-day summit called for “urgent action” on food security, but did not set targets or any timeframes to do so.

"I am not satisfied with the fact that there is no commitment regarding the calendar, amounts and conditions," said FAO Director General Jacques Diouf.

The summit statement does not include any new financial commitments, though it calls on wealthy countries to honour their commitments.

A Group of Eight (G8) summit in July pledged 13.3 billion euros over the next three years, though conspicuously absent from the Rome summit this week are the heads of most of those eight leaders.

Keeping them to their promises is key to fighting hunger, says Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

“Pledges we have made in the past have not been respected,” he told RFI, adding that to really eradicate hunger, poor countries – the ones most affected by hunger – need to have more of a say in world food and agriculture decisions.

“I am struck in many discussions that many people do not understand where hunger comes from… and as a result the policies prescribed are based on abstract considerations, and not informed by the views of the poorest,” he said.

Adriano Campolina, Director of the Action Aid NGO, agrees. He was disappointed in the lack of firm money commitments, but he praised the summit statement because it gives each country a vote in negotiations.

“It gives more conditions to the poorer countries of the world, to make their view prevail… they have to have the same voice and the same power,” he told RFI.

Campolina criticises policies pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions he says are controlled by wealthy nations, which push poor countries to dismantle economic structures that supported local agriculture, and to lower tariffs.

“The agriculture of the poor countries was very much damaged by the subsidies in Europe and the US,” he said, explaining that poorer countries have been “forced to reduce their tariffs, but the European and North American countries were not forced to reduce their subsidies.”