Food Security: The Challenge Remains
By Jacques Diouf

FAO Photo

The twentieth century witnessed a remarkable agricultural revolution which led to global food production rising even faster than the unprecedented rate of population growth. The world’s farmers and fishermen now produce more than enough food for every man, woman and child on the planet to be adequately nourished. Yet, one in every eight people in the world remains chronically hungry.

The plight of the hungry all too often evokes a response only when vast populations are brought to the brink of famine and mass starvation - mere bundles of skin and bone, fleeing their homes in a desperate quest for survival. Most hunger, however, is far less visible and does not make the headlines or horrify television audiences. Yet widespread chronic hunger - the hunger that comes with one meal rather than two or three each day - causes immense suffering and undermines the well-being of nations and makes them vulnerable to disaster. Hunger predisposes people to illness and premature death; it robs youth and adults of their potential to work; and it cripples children’s growth and learning abilities. Hunger is as much a cause as an effect of poverty, and it traps families in a vicious cycle that passes from one generation to another.

Five years ago, leaders of almost every nation in the world unanimously decided to cut the number of the world’s hungry by half - from 800 million to 400 million persons - by the year 2015. Since making that commitment at the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, only some nations, however, have been successful in reducing the incidence of hunger. On a global scale, the number of undernourished people is being cut at less than half the rate needed to reach the Summit goal on time.

There is very little evidence of the large-scale purposive action needed to get to grips with the underlying causes of hunger. Instead, what we are seeing is a rise in man-made and natural disasters and in the frequency with which regions are afflicted by instability. This has been combined with a worrying decline in the resources being invested in agriculture in developing countries, and particularly in the funding for agriculture and rural development by the international financial institutions, which has dropped by 40 per cent in the past decade to some $3.5 billion per year. These trends are bound to undermine the livelihoods of very large numbers of rural dwellers, who account for 70 per cent of the world's poor and the majority of its undernourished people.

Nor has there been the expected progress in market liberalization, which could have pumped new resources into the economies of agriculture-dependent developing countries. The protection offered by the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to their farmers - some $361 billion in 1999 (or 100 times as much as the annual flow of multilateral lending for agriculture) - helps to make cheap food available in the international marketplace, but, in so doing, also undermines the income prospects of many of the world's poorest farmers.

Eliminating hunger, apart from being a moral imperative, is a first and essential step in reducing poverty. As long as large numbers of people are hungry, the response to new opportunities for economic growth is bound to be muted, and little progress will be made towards the international development goal of cutting extreme poverty by half by 2015. Some countries have shown how poverty can be cut dramatically through strategies, which combine targeted measures for reducing chronic undernourishment with investments in rural development. Other nations can follow such examples.

FAO Headquarters in Rome FAO Photo/L. Spaventa

History will judge our generation to have failed, whatever progress we may have made in technological innovation or in global prosperity, if we have not succeeded in reducing the scourge of hunger when advances in science and the processes of globalization have placed all the means to do so within our reach.

We cannot honestly claim that we are unable to produce enough food for all, or that we do not have the means to ensure that all people have access to sufficient food for a healthy life.

I have absolutely no doubt that it is in the self-interest of all countries - rich and poor - to create conditions in which hunger no longer robs people of opportunities and drives them to despair. I also believe that if we - Governments, international organizations, civil society, community leaders, farmers - set our minds to it, the Summit goal lies well within our reach.

The communiqué of the G-8 Summit in Genoa placed hunger reduction high amongst the priorities for international action. What is needed now is for both developed and developing countries to reaffirm their resolve to translate the commitments made in 1996 into tangible actions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is confident that, by inviting Heads of State and Government for the World Food Summit: Five Years Later this November, the necessary political resolve to achieve a world free from hunger to which we all aspire can be created.

Our success, however, will ultimately depend not so much on the renewed commitments made at the Summit, but on what happens in response to these pledges in the fields and rural communities across the face of the earth, and what resources are subsequently mobilized and effectively used in a timely manner. Civil society can do much to strengthen the political will of Governments to break the hunger trap and the capacity of poor communities to improve their livelihoods. FAO is, therefore, working closely with Governments and non-governmental organizations from both developed and developing countries to agree on concrete and practical measures, which will enable the Summit goals to be met.

Jacques Diouf has been Director-General of FAO since January 1994. Prior to his appointment, he was Ambassador at the Permanent Mission of Senegal to the United Nations and has also served as a Member of the Senegalese Parliament. He has written The Challenge of Agricultural Development in Africa.
	FAO Photo/L. Spaventa