BY PETER ROSSET
Why do more than 800 million people still go hungry in a world marked by incredible affluence? Representatives from 180 countries gathered in Rome for the World Food Summit from June 10 to 13 to address just that question.
At the 1996 World Food Summit, also held in Rome, 185 governments signed a commitment to cut the number of hungry people by half by 2015. Cuba's President Fidel Castro made waves at the 1996 meeting — echoing the feelings of many — when he called that goal "shameful" for its abandonment of any notion of eliminating hunger. Subsequent trends have been more shameful.
This year's summit was called by the United Nations to examine why hunger persists despite the 1996 gathering's Plan of Action. Progress has lagged by at least 60% behind the plan's goals for the first five years, and today conditions are worsening in much of the world.
Without a drastic reorientation of policies, it will be impossible to meet the 2015 goal. Hunger may actually increase. While official documents prepared for the meeting decry a "lack of will" and call for "more resources" to be directed at reducing hunger, the fact is that more fundamental changes are needed.
Research carried out by Food First/the Institute for Food and Development Policy reveals that since 1996, governments have presided over policies that have conspired to undercut peasant, small and family farmers, and farm cooperatives, in countries both North and South.
These policies have included runaway trade liberalisation, pitting family farmers in the Third World against the subsidised corporate farms in the North (witness the recent US farm bill), forcing Third World countries to eliminate price supports and subsidies for food producers, the privatisation of credit, the excessive promotion of exports to the detriment of food crops, the patenting of genetic crop resources by corporations which charge farmers for their use, and a bias in agricultural research toward expensive and questionable technologies like genetic engineering while virtually ignoring pro-poor alternatives like organic farming and agro-ecology.
Increasingly, poor farmers find that credit is inadequate or too expensive to cover their rising production costs, buyers of their crops are more scarce and monopolistic than ever, and prices are too low to cover credit and production costs. The net result has been a significant and continued deterioration in poor farmers' access to land, as they are forced to sell land they own, cannot afford land rents or lose land by defaulting on loans.
The worst hunger in the world is found in rural areas, where the landless are the poorest of the poor, yet governments have dragged their feet in implementing existing land reform and land re-distribution policies. Governments have resisted efforts — sometimes using force — by people's organisations and landless movements to push the implementation of these policies.
These same governments have stood by as land has increasingly been turned into a commercial asset out of reach for the poor and watched passively as business interests — both agricultural (plantations) and non-agricultural (e.g. petroleum exploration) — encroached on communal and public lands, and on the territories of indigenous peoples.
Furthermore, governments have done nothing while agricultural commodity chains become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few transnational corporations which, by virtue of their near monopoly status, are increasingly setting costs and prices unfavourable to farmers, putting all, especially the poorest, in an untenable cost-price squeeze, thus encouraging the massive abandonment of agriculture and migration to urban slums.
While governments seem blind to the ways their policies enforce hunger and impoverishment for hundreds of millions of people, others see this harsh reality with clarity. Hundreds of farmers' movements and non-governmental organisations have come to Rome from around the world to hold their own forum — the World Forum on Food Sovereignty — in parallel with the official summit.
These movements demand that governments take agriculture out of the World Trade Organisation, which forces countries to open their borders to the cheap, dumped food imports that drive their own farmers out of business, off the land and into hunger. They call for true land reform to put good quality land in the hands of those who would sow it, rather than those who can afford to buy it.
They also demand that the fundamental right to food — recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — be made a reality by the enforcement of what they call "food sovereignty", which refers to the rights of peasants and family farmers to grow food for their own countries and supply poor consumers with enough to eat.
These demands, unlike the weak official calls, get at the root cause of persistent hunger and should be endorsed by all caring people.
[Peter Rosset is co-director of Food First/the Institute for Food and Development Policy (visit <http://www.foodfirst.org>) and co-author of World Hunger: Twelve Myths.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 19, 2002.
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