"Youth against Hunger"
Message on the occasion of World Food Day and
TeleFood 1999
Rome, Italy, 16 October 1999
Today, on the occasion of the nineteenth observance of
World Food
Day, we celebrate the fifty-fourth anniversary of the
founding, in Quebec City, Canada, of the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
This year's World Food Day and TeleFood
theme - "Youth against Hunger" - has been chosen both to
underline the role of young people in the fight against
hunger and malnutrition and to provide a strategic
opportunity for their involvement in the campaign to
achieve food for all.
Youth make up approximately 17 percent of the
total global population. In developing countries, they
often represent an even larger percentage of the total
number of people, especially in rural areas. Currently,
around 472 million young people between the ages of
15 to 24 live in the countryside. By 2015, the world
youth population will be about 1.4 billion persons.
That is 1.4 billion young people who could be
mobilized to fight hunger and to achieve the World Food
Summit goal of reducing by half the more than
800 million hungry and chronically undernourished
people.
It is, therefore, important that we take youth issues
into consideration when we set the development agenda,
and when we formulate policy at the national level. This
is particularly so in agrarian and semi-urban societies,
where young people help whenever they can with the work
of producing food for subsistence. Similarly, in areas of
civil strife, or where AIDS is taking a high toll,
households headed by boys and girls have become a grim
reality and are dramatically increasing in number. The
role youth play in agricultural production for food
security, under these conditions, is of paramount
concern.
Hunger and chronic undernutrition are obstacles to
human life. When a person lacks physical or practical
access to safe, nutritious and healthy food at all times,
the consequences are disastrous. In the case of young
people facing hunger and malnutrition, their plight is
further exacerbated by the intertwined issues of
illiteracy, poverty and unemployment, which in turn block
access to education, basic skills training and
employment.
With futures so often uncertain in their rural
communities, many young people have joined the ranks of
those migrating to urban centres or even abroad. Another
important factor contributing to this migration is the
low regard that young people have for agriculture as a
profession. As cities swell with these unskilled
newcomers, a whole range of urban, social, environmental
and political problems intensify, such as rapid slum
growth, drug trafficking, unemployment, and crime.
The first step in breaking this negative spiral is to
focus on the basic issue of eradicating hunger and
malnutrition. We have the knowledge and technology to do
so, as well as the global capacity for efficient and
sustainable food production. But what is also needed is
education, awareness building and the strengthening of
formal and informal social organizations to help young
people to put their hands on productive services and
resources necessary for food production.
The challenge which thus faces our generation is to
ensure that our youth, be they in developed or developing
countries, play a more meaningful role in ensuring food
security. In the industrialised countries, this can be
accomplished by participating, as part of the vast array
of government and civil society institutions and
organizations, in promotional and fundraising activities
against hunger. For those even more committed, young
people can also be involved as policy advocates in the
dialogue with their governments as part of a broad
campaign to achieve food for all.
In the developing countries, the challenge is to
meaningfully involve youth as active partners in food
security and agricultural production activities, by
overcoming constraints such as lack of land, access to
credit and other production resources; lack of education
and training for on-farm and off-farm employment, and by
providing for income and asset-generating activities in
the rural areas. There is also a need to organize groups
of young people, as part of the community empowerment
process, to enable them to obtain access to extension and
other support services provided by governments,
non-government organizations, and the private sector.
As in the past, this year's World Food Day observance
provides an opportunity for governments and all sectors
of civil society to come together to review progress made
in the follow-up to the World Food Summit. It also
provides an occasion for dialogue and for mobilizing
various sectors of civil society in the fight to
eradicate hunger, poverty and malnutrition. By drawing
attention to the problems and possibilities of youth, we
sensitize policy and decision-makers to the needs,
priorities and potential contribution of young people in
food security endeavours.
World Food Day celebrations will kick off today with
The World Food Day ceremony at FAO Headquarters, as well
as numerous TeleFood events organized around the world,
and culminate in a five-hour gala concert in Jamaica to
be broadcast globally on 4 December. Over the last
two years, the yearly TeleFood global telecast has been
watched by more than 500 million people in all
continents, many of whom responded the the TeleFood
message of "Food for All" by contributing to the TeleFood
Fund. The donations received have gone to support simple
projects that directly help poor male and female farmers,
including young farmers, to produce food, improve
nutrition and generate incomes to provide a higher
quality of life for themselves and their families and
communities.
It is my hope that by drawing world attention to the
contributions of Youth against Hunger, this World Food
Day will serve as a benchmark in the World Food Summit
Goal of halving world hunger by 2015. In this manner, we
can make a start in paying our obligations to the next
generation by ensuring, in the coming millenium, a world
free from hunger.
