EuropaWorld 23/11/2001 Parliaments Told To Raise the Profile of the World's Hungry

Dr Jacques Diouf, the indefatigable head of the UN's Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was at it again last week, spelling out the grim statistics of the world's hungry and urging the full-bellied world to do something more about it, including setting national targets for reducing the numbers of hungry people in each country.

The occasion was a meeting in Berlin of the Heads of Parliamentary Committees of EU Member States, EU Accession countries and the Russian Duma, and the message of the FAO head - and the title of his address - were the responsibilities of parliaments for world nutrition.

FAO is the leading agency for world agriculture, or more bluntly, food. While the World Food Programme has the task of feeding the hungry, FAO's primary role is to orchestrate the efforts of the countries of the world to feed themselves.

In this FAO has an uphill task. Apart from one small programme the agency has not had a budget increase for eight years despite new demands placed upon it. In 1996 a world food summit agreed on the goal of halving the number of hungry people in the world in twenty years. At present rates of progress that task will take sixty.

There are still 815 million hungry people in the world, that is only a little more than one in seven of the population and of course they are concentrated in certain countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Hungry people cannot work like their well-fed counterparts, Diouf told his audience, nor do malnourished children study well. And all hungry people have little resistance to disease.

Moreover, in addition to the total of the chronically hungry, the world is facing more than 30 severe food emergencies, said Dr Diouf, affecting more than 50 million people. What is more, a rising share of these emergencies are man-made and avoidable.

It is not the case that it is difficult to produce food we need, but investment is required in machines, in irrigation systems, in storage and processing facilities and so forth. FAO reckon that, to be on track to meet the hunger target, the world needs to be investing about $180 billion each year in agriculture. This may seem a large sum of money, but it is dwarfed by what the governments of rich countries pay to their farmers in agricultural subsidies.

According to FAO, governments in OECD countries - basically the 'rich' countries - spent $356 billion on agricultural subsidies in 1999. Meanwhile, in developing regions, investment rates in primary agriculture were on average 12 per cent below what was needed, and 38 per cent lower in sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Diouf said.

While the average rich country farmer received $11,000 in government subsidies, his poor country counterpart received only some $4.30 in development assistance from the same governments. Moreover, the share of development assistance being earmarked for agriculture is falling steadily as financing goes to more 'glamorous' projects.

Dr Diouf summed up the dangers: "recent events have dramatically reminded us of the need to deal with hunger. The injustice of 800 million people going to bed hungry every night while, in other parts of the world food is abundant, and sometimes wasted, cannot be overlooked. Such a situation fuels the sense of frustration and engrosses the ranks of those who believe that inequities cannot be eliminated with peaceful means."

What was missing he said was the political will to change the situation. He urged the parliamentarians to work to provide better market access for poor countries and to develop international trade rules that gave developing countries the flexibility they needed to pursue their rural development and food security goals.