By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli
ROME, Oct 3 (IPS) – It was once true that all roads led to this ancient capital. Today it is the furrows of maize, wheat and rice fields that take you to Rome, where the biggest global food organisations are headquartered, and the World Summit on Food Security (Nov. 16-18) is being organised.
The situation couldn’t be more momentous.
“The global food insecurity situation has worsened and continues to represent a serious threat for humanity,” says the summit website. According to the latest U.N. projections, the world population will rise from 6.8 billion to 9.1 billion in 2050 – a third more mouths to feed. Most population growth will occur in developing countries.
High food prices in developing countries, a global economic crisis affecting jobs, deepening poverty, and more hungry people combine to paint a bleak picture.
So, what are the expectations of the food organisations present in Rome?
Kostas Stamoulis, head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) agricultural development economics division, says this summit “is not a fund- raising exercise…the original position is that we eliminate hunger, preferably by 2025, although I am not sure if this will be the summit’s objective, because the countries have yet to agree on the targets…”
One of the concrete issues on the table, he says, is “reform of the global governance of food security. It has to be better coordinated, because so far every crisis turns into a big disaster. Also, despite all the wealth in the world, we have seen chronically hungry people increasing since 1996.”
A recent paper by FAO says that “producing 70 percent more food for an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050 while at the same time combating poverty and hunger, using scarce natural resources more efficiently, and adapting to climate change are the main challenges world agriculture will face in the coming decades.”
For Stamoulis, in order to produce more food, “we have to make sure that farmers are properly supported in the developed and developing countries, not at the expense of each other.” So far we are not doing a good job, he says. “Developed countries support farmers tremendously, while developing countries do not have the means.
“Part of the objective too is to make sure that countries realise that a lot more resources have to be devoted to agriculture. Not necessarily during the summit…this is not a pledge summit. That happened in July, when the G8 pledged 20 billion dollars to support agriculture. This is a summit where countries, at the highest level, reconfirm their support.”
At the summit of the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful countries, held in July in the Italian city of L’Aquila, they decided to mobilise 20 billion dollars over three years to fight the food crisis, and it was said the money could be used to promote agriculture rather than as aid. But people like Paolo di Croce, secretary-general of Slow Food International, were sceptical. “We have to change the model that caused this situation (of food crisis), not patch up the gaps with some crisis money,” he said in an earlier interview with IPS.
For Stamoulis, this is a good point. The money should be invested primarily on small farmers, he says. Investments should be made too in infrastructure – roads, ports, storage facilities. “In terms of technology and access to markets, we have to make sure small holders take a fair share of this allocation, so they increase their productivity.”
