Statement by the
Director-General
on the occasion of World Food Day and TeleFood
2000
Rome, Italy, 16 October 2000
The Right Honourable Owen Seymour Arthur, Prime
Minister of Barbados,
Your Excelllency, Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, Minister for
Agriculture and Forestry Policies of Italy,
Your Excellency, Monsignor Marchetto, Permanent Observer
of the Holy See
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On the occasion of the first World
Food Day celebration of the new millennium, I would
like to invoke both a vision and a challenge to the world
community. The vision is a world in which every man,
woman and child can be assured of having the food they
need to be well-nourished and healthy, enabling them to
develop to their fullest potential. The challenge I
invoke is to make that vision a reality.
The world as a community must ensure equitable access
to the most basic of life's requirements - food - which
directly affects the welfare of individuals and the
overall development of nations. The strength of a nation
depends upon the strength of its people. When people are
well-nourished, healthy and strong, they have the energy,
creativity and security to work and learn, to solve
problems, and to live their daily lives with dignity and
joy, ultimately advancing mankind to new heights.
Not everyone has access to adequate food at all times.
While significant progress has been made in the fight
against hunger, the number of people in the world who are
chronically undernourished and are unable to meet their
basic daily energy requirements to lead an active and
healthy life, is still unacceptably high. At the
beginning of the third millennium, freedom from hunger
remains an elusive goal for 820 million people and
continues to undermine the socio-economic development of
many nations.
Moreover, millions suffer world-wide from malnutrition
due to the lack of essential vitamins and minerals, and
millions more are at risk of problems caused by
contaminated food and water. Access to sufficient
supplies of a variety of good-quality, safe food persists
as a serious problem in many countries, even where food
supplies are adequate at the national level. In every
country, some form of hunger and malnutrition continues
to exist.
Many accept hunger as a grim but inevitable fact of
life. This need not be the case; hunger and malnutrition
are not inevitable in a world of plenty. Nor are they
tolerable. We have the knowledge, technology and
resources to make rapid progress in the global fight
against hunger. It is primarily the lack of collective
will that is preventing us from eliminating hunger. We
must be firmly committed to reject the unacceptable and
the intolerable.
Recent experience indicates that chronic hunger can be
dispelled within this century. In the last few decades,
significant achievements have been made in the areas of
food supplies, nutrition, health and access to basic
social services. As a result, the world's population is
better fed, healthier, and lives longer than that of 30
years ago. The number of undernourished people in the
world has declined from approximately 920 million in 1970
to the present level of 820 million. Global food supplies
have outpaced dramatic population growth, with per caput
food availability growing by 32 percent while the
population increased by 2 billion people.
Hunger and malnutrition are the primary indicators of
poverty which is being reduced through access to jobs,
education, health facilities, sanitation, clean water and
safe housing. All these elements in turn affect food
security and the nutritional status of individuals.
The improvement of the life of millions of people is
very encouraging. This fact is positive proof that we
have the tools and the ability to address and overcome
the major causes of hunger and malnutrition. Of course
the positive trends are expected to continue. But will
they continue at a rate sufficient to improve further the
conditions of today's population and adequately provide
for the next generations to come? Will additional
improvements occur rapidly enough to alleviate the
immense suffering of the millions of men, women and
children afflicted by chronic hunger and
malnutrition?
It is my ardent wish to reply "Yes" to these
questions. However, we know that the current rate of
progress in reducing the number of undernourished is not
sufficient even to meet the World
Food Summit goal of reducing by at least half the
number of undernourished people by the year 2015, let
alone surpass that goal. Clearly, we have much more to do
and no time to waste if we are to make the vision of a
world free from hunger become a reality.
How can this be done? There are no simple answers, but
there are common approaches that have proven to be
effective in accelerating progress. As a fundamental
first step, the elimination of hunger and malnutrition
must be adopted as a primary goal of national, social and
economic development.
At the World Food Summit, governments and
international organizations arrived at a consensus on key
strategies for improving food security and nutritional
status. They identified the major factors in world food
security - poverty, constraints on food production,
population growth, urbanization rates, changing dietary
patterns, under-investment in agricultural research and
rural infrastructure, conflict and instability, lack of
priority to agriculture and rural areas in government
policy and agreed to make concerted efforts in each and
all of these critical areas.
It is time to begin aggressively pursuing the
objectives set by the World Food Summit. Noble words and
promises were transcribed into a framework of seven
commitments, which now must be carried out. This will
require the determination of governments, working
alongside intergovernmental institutions, the private
sector, NGOs and civil society, to create policies that
will help achieve these goals. The processes governing
such action must be focused on empowering today's
food-insecure populations - the poor, and predominantly
the rural poor. Governments must take action to correct
the biased distribution of such fundamental services and
assets as education, information, health care,
employment, technological advances, credit, and land and
water resources.
Investment in agriculture, the engine of economic
growth in most developing countries, is fundamental for
improving the plight of developing countries. Poverty
alleviation programmes, targeted to the rural poor, are
needed to bring the most destitute into the mainstream
economy. Increasing access to land, technology, inputs
and credit for rural women - who constitute
60 percent of the world's farmers - is a key to
improving family nutrition, food production and income.
Investment in people overall is needed, in the form of
education, clean water and sanitation, health and social
services, and when required, direct food and nutrition
support.
I recall Commitment One of the World Food Summit Plan
of Action, which states: "We will ensure an enabling
political, social and economic environment designed to
create the best conditions for the eradication of poverty
and for durable peace, based on full and equal
participation of women and men, which is most conducive
to achieving sustainable food security for all." It is
against this internationally agreed commitment that we
should measure national and international efforts to
combat the multiple causes of food insecurity and restore
the basic human right to be free from hunger.
This year's World Food Day is a call for collective
action to meet and surpass as quickly as possible the
goal of the World Food Summit. On this World Food Day, I
appeal to governments and all sectors of society to join
with solidarity in the efforts to meet this goal.
Together, let us insist upon eliminating hunger and
malnutrition. Let us insist upon it as the first and most
important potential achievement on our agenda. It is a
challenge and an obligation for each and every one of us
to contribute to creating and sustaining throughout the
new millennium a world free from hunger.
