It is indeed an honour for me to address this World Food Day Celebration. At the World Food Summit in 1996 and at the Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders made a commitment to halve the number of people living in absolute poverty and hunger by 2015. In Asia and Pacific today, over five-hundred-million people are undernourished and are unable to live healthy and active lives. Reducing hunger will also significantly contribute to addressing other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, reducing the risk of infectious diseases and extending the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS.
Countries of Asia and the Pacific have made faster progress than other parts of the developing world in reducing poverty and hunger. The most spectacular successes come from South East Asia and East Asia. China, for example, almost halved the number of people living with hunger in the decade of the 1990s.
However, as a region, Asia-Pacific’s success still falls far short of the rate needed to achieve the target by 2015. This is particularly true for South Asia, where countries like India and Nepal have seen a net increase of people living with hunger in terms of absolute numbers.
While fighting hunger we must also take into account that some current strategies for improving agricultural productivity endanger sustainable growth. Our policy interventions must seek to protect the environment while increasing agricultural productivity.
Moreover, market penetration and introduction of new technologies in communities that predominantly rely on subsistence agriculture, may lead to restructuring and consolidation of agricultural production and may make many farmers redundant. Alternative strategies for rural development need to studied and introduced, including off-farm employment, development of rural centres and linking rural areas to small towns and medium sized cities.
We must empower the poor by strengthening food security and increasing physical, economic, social and political access to markets, services and forums of decision-making. We must also recognize that in many countries women are particularly vulnerable to hunger and poverty and work towards reducing these disparities. In other words we must design and implement pro-poor and gender-aware development policies.
On the occasion of the Twenty-third World Food Day Celebration, I urge you to reaffirm your political commitment to work even harder to create the policy environment, provide the funding and implement the programmes to empower the poor to overcome hunger and poverty. UNESCAP remains committed to foster regional cooperation and assisting its members in building their capacities to achieve the MDGs, particularly those related to reducing hunger and poverty. As some of you are aware UNESCAP underwent a process of reform that seeks to make its assistance more targeted. Under the overarching goal of assisting countries in achieving the MDGs, UNESCAP’s work now focuses around three themes: reducing poverty, managing globalization and addressing emerging social issues.
Together with the United Nations Development Programme, UNESCAP is involved in monitoring the progress in achieving the MDGs in Asia and the Pacific. The initiative also focuses on analyzing successful policies used by member countries in achieving the MDGs and transferring these lessons to other countries. We have also initiated flagship technical cooperation projects that seek to collect and transfer best practices in rural development, promoting more productive rural-urban linkages and in providing access to markets and economic and social services to the poor. We will continue to work with countries of the region, in close cooperation with FAO and other agencies within and outside the United Nations family to assist you in enabling the poor to overcome hunger and poverty.
