Keynote speech by Sartaj Aziz
Former agriculture, finance and foreign affairs minister of Pakistan
The importance of the World Food Day, observed every year, has increased after the 1996 World Food Summit as it provides a valuable opportunity at the global, regional and national level to review the implementation of the Plan of Action adopted by the summit and its specific targets. This year, the occasion is of particular significance as it will focus on the formulation of specific modalities to build an International alliance against hunger as called for by the 2002 World Food Summit, five years later.
Let me begin by recalling the key commitments undertaking by the international community and the progress made so far in implementing them.
The target
The 1996 World Food Summit established the target of reducing the number of undernourished people by half, within a 20 year period, i.e. by 2015. The Millennium Summit held in September 2000, adopted a similar target of halving by 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or afford safe drinking water.
In my view, the WFS target, endorsed again by the WFS: fyl, is more appropriate, as under the Millenium target even if achieved, the absolute number of malnourished people will decline only marginally (from 800 million to 700 million) even though the proportion of undernourished people will decline from 18 to 9 percent. Under the WFS target, on the other hand, the absolute number will decline from 800 million to 400 million and the proportion will go down from 18 to 6 percent. The international community should therefore adopt the WFS goal, as meeting this goal would automatically meet the Millenium Development Goal.
Progress
According to FAO’s latest assessment, the progress towards the WFS goal of halving the number of undernourished people is very slow as can be seen from the following numbers:
(a) There has been only a marginal decrease of 20 million or 2.5 million per annum, in the number of malnourished persons in the developing world from 820 to 800 million between 1990-92 and 2000. This is far below the reduction of 22 million required under the WFS goal of halving the number of hungry people by 2015.
(b) Even this limited “progress” is primarily due to the sharp reduction of 80 million in the number of undernourished persons in China. If that figure is excluded, there has been an actual increase of 60 million undernourished people, in the rest of the developing world. In fact, out of a total of 96 developing countries, only 24 countries are on track in achieving the WFS targets, 28 are slipping back and 44 are totally off track.
(c) Sub-Sahara Africa continues to have the highest incidence of under-nourished since one-third of its population, i.e. 200 million persons are chronically undernourished. In South Asia, the comparable percentage is 20 percent, although in absolute terms, it has 320 million or 40 percent of all the undernourished persons in the developing world as a whole.
Ironically, the reduction in the number of undernourished people in the developing world in 1980s was much faster than that in the 1990s, despite such high level commitments at Copenhagen, Rome and New York in the latter period. Hence the need to identify the causes why the world is moving towards more, rather than less hunger and then to identify policies and actions that must be taken at the national and international level to reverse this trend and move towards the WFS target at the required pace.
Causes and solutions of chronic hunger
The causes of chronic hunger are well known and well documented, as are the solutions. These can be summarized as follows:
The basic cause of
hunger is poverty. That is why increased production and availability of food is
necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving food security. The poor
must have adequate access to food i.e. the ability to produce or buy the food
they need for their families.
Access to adequate
food depends on the pattern of landholding, income distribution, employment
opportunities and food prices. Lack of formal legal rights to land is a major
factor that hinders poor people’s access to credit, which can help to
improve their income and livelihood.
The rural poor are
poor because their initial access to assets or skills is inadequate in relation
to their basic needs. But this poor endowment then also compels these households
to transact unfavourably in product, labour and credit markets and getting
locked into deeper poverty.
Sustained economic
growth stimulated by rapid expansion in domestic and international trade is
necessary for expanding incomes and employment opportunities for the poor but is
not sufficient. The essence of any strategy to reduce poverty must focus on
improving the human resource endowment of the poor households and on organizing
them to gain a more favourable position in the labour and product
markets.
Poverty is mostly a
rural phenomenon. The goals of reducing poverty and hunger will therefore
require larger investments in rural infrastructure to improve irrigation, rural
roads and electricity and in agricultural research and extension.
Simultaneously, non-farm rural economy has to be developed by promoting small
and medium scale industries in rural areas.
The impact of these
investments on poverty and hunger can be maximized if there are focussed on poor
areas and poor people, supplemented by micro-credit programmes and accompanied
by suitable macro-economic policies that will improve the terms of trade for the
agriculture sector and bring about significant improvement in health and
education services, particularly for women. Illiteracy and illness are two of
the most important causes of poverty.
Efficient
distribution of food is as important as its production, particularly for
delivering food items to the poor and to far-flung areas at reasonable and
stable prices.
The impact of
poverty is particularly harsh for children. At present, about one-third of all
pre-school children are malnourished in developing countries, causing
irreparable damage to their growth and mental capacity. Special priority is
therefore needed to address the problems of nutrition for children.
Natural calamities
like droughts and floods and other external shocks like civil wars have a
disproportionately high impact on the poor people and their nutrition. Every
country needs a comprehensive strategy to deal with the food emergencies arising
from these natural and man made calamities.
While developing countries have been trying to deal with these causes of hunger and poverty with varying degrees of success, there are certain new and overriding international factors that have further aggravated food security prospects for the poor:
Policies of economic
liberalization that have been adopted by a growing number of developing
countries, under adjustment programmes of the World Bank and IMF over the past
decade have had a highly negative impact on the poor. Even in countries in which
these policies have helped to improve investment and growth, they have not been
very successful in reducing poverty, partly because the poor are at the lowest
rung of the competitive ladder and partly because the adjustment process by
reducing public investment to cut down budget deficit and subsidies, have also
increased inequality and unemployment.
Attempts are being
made since 1999, to reduce the negative impact of economic and trade
liberalization on the poor, by repackaging the structural adjustment programmes
into poverty reduction strategies. IMF has also renamed its Extended Structural
Adjustment Facility (ESAF) as Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). This
approach represents some improvement since it forces countries to go deeper into
causes of poverty. But the net impact of PRSP in reducing poverty has so far
been limited. This is primarily because the basic policy framework of PRSP is
still wedded to the traditional IMF agenda for macro-economic stabilization
under which macro-economic targets and conditionalities are worked out in great
details. But targets and policies needed to promote investment, growth and
employment, which are even more critical for poverty reduction, are spelled out
in general terms and can at best be called “pious hopes”. There are
also limited prospects for increasing the overall flow of external resources for
poverty reduction, despite the commitments made at Monterrey.
Another and even
more serious obstacle in achieving the WFS goal of halving hunger, is the
continuing policy of OECD countries to provide agricultural subsidies of over
$350 billion each year. These subsidies have led to surplus production of many
commodities like cereals, sugar, cotton, edible oils and dairy products, which
are exported or dumped in developing countries at low prices. These low
agricultural prices (which in real terms are the lowest ever in the past three
decades) have:
destroyed the livelihood of millions of poor farmers in developing countries;
weakened the incentive system for increasing domestic production, through the adoption of improved technologies;
diverted investment resources away from the agriculture sector in many countries because agriculture is no longer a profitable sector to justify investment in research, extension, agro processing and marketing infrastructure; and
reduced the share of most developing countries in international agriculture trade.
Despite the paramount importance of removing this major obstacle, the failure of the WTO Ministerial Meeting held at Cancun in September 2003 to resolve the issue of agricultural subsidies is a major setback to the WFS and MDG objectives of reducing hunger and poverty.
International alliance against hunger
In the face of these formidable obstacles, both at the national and international levels, it should not be difficult to recognize the enormity of the tasks that lie ahead. In this context, the decision of the World Food Summit fyl, held in June 2002, to build an International alliance against hunger, is both timely and important. The next step is to make this alliance effective and spell out in concrete terms, the policies and the actions that must be taken at the national and international levels, to move towards the WFS goal at the required pace.
Guidelines for national action
Brazil and Sierra Leone have recently made hunger eradication their highest priority. Brazil’s zero hunger programme, announced by President Lula Da’Silva, contains a comprehensive policy package covering land redistribution, investment programmes for different regions with a concentration of hungry people, integrated nutrition programmes for children and social safety nets. Similarly, the President of Sierra Leone has announced a programme to end hunger within five years.
One of main priorities of the International alliance against hunger should be to urge as many developing countries as possible to announce, at the highest political level, their commitment to end hunger in their countries within a period of 10 years and for this purpose to launch a concrete programme of action with a high level body to monitor implementation on a regular basis.
The declarations of the World Food Summits held in 1996 and 2002, already provide the broad elements of the action programmes that are required to end hunger. These can be prioritized or modified according to the ground situation in each country with concrete targets and monitoring arrangements at the highest level. FAO should be ready to assist countries in giving final shape to their hunger eradication programmes.
Countries that have formulated a poverty reduction strategy or an interim strategy can and should devise a separate sub-strategy for eradicating hunger, according to the following guidelines:
While poverty is the
root cause of hunger, the factors which lead to chronic poverty are more complex
and deep seated than those leading to under- nourishment. In other words, it
should be possible, through appropriate policies and programmes, to reduce
hunger at a faster pace than chronic poverty.
The strategy for
reducing hunger must focus on the following important policies and
programmes:
(a) strengthening incentives for the production of food crops primarily for domestic consumption;
(b) evolving a more efficient system of food storage and marketing, including a price support system for staple crops like wheat, rice and maize;
(c) an efficient food distribution system to ensure the availability of food in all parts of the country throughout the year at reasonable and stable prices;
(d) evolving a food price policy under which the farmers receive a remunerative price for their output but the consumers, including very low income consumers, have access to food at reasonable prices;
(e) an appropriate system of social safety nets, under which very poor people who are outside the mainstream of economic activities like widows, orphans, handicapped persons or very old people, can receive food at subsidized prices.
The national strategy for eradicating hunger must also ensure that these objectives are fully protected from the adverse impact of inevitable fluctuations in the international agricultural markets, and of the structural adjustment policies involving reductions in subsidies and budgetary expenditures. This is why there is a need for a political commitment at the highest level to reconcile these conflicting objectives in favour of the hunger objective.
The content and direction of each national programme to eradicate hunger will have to be reviewed and periodically modified in the light of actual experience. It would also be necessary to define the role of all stakeholders and groups, including the civil society, the scientists and the private sector, in the pursuit of this common goal. Each country would also need suitable institutional mechanisms to coordinate these activities in the course of implementation and regular monitoring.
International support
The international community has accepted, for the first time, the specific goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015, at the 1996 World Summit and the Millenium Summit held in September 2000. These commitments were further reinforced at Monterrey, Doha and Johannesburg in 2001 and 2002. It is therefore truly ironic that despite such a historic global compact, international action in support of this goal is seriously lagging behind the initiatives and actions being taken by a large majority of developing countries to tackle the problem of hunger and poverty. Unless and until there is stronger international support, the national efforts to achieve the WFS and MDG goals would not yield the desired results.
More specific priorities for global action under the International alliance against hunger would include the following:
a) An agreed time frame for reducing agricultural subsidies in OECD countries as already agreed in Doha.
b) Speedy implementation of the commitment made at Monterrey to increase official development assistance on soft terms, for agriculture and rural development projects and programmes.
c) Providing debt relief under the HIPC initiative without conditionalities and expanding the debt relief initiative to other low income developing countries.
d) A policy decision by the World Bank and regional development banks to finance national agricultural research programmes on a grant basis, as is being done for international research under the CGIAR system. Without much larger allocations for agricultural research on a grant basis, the current technological divide between the North and the South will be impossible to bridge.
e) There is also need for greater fiscal flexibility in financing public sector development programmes in developing countries. For example, external resources provided as grants or on very soft terms for reducing poverty and hunger should not be counted towards the fiscal deficit targets.
To sum up, at least one fourth of the developing countries have successfully adopted policies to reduce hunger and poverty. The most outstanding example of this success comes from China. If the International alliance against hunger can get into motion a process under which the objective of eliminating - or at least reducing - hunger is accorded top priority at the highest political level and a separate national strategy is formulated for this purpose by each country with the cooperation of all stake holders, there is no reason, why the WFS target of halving the number of undernourished persons by 2015, would not only be achieved but exceeded.
