Keynote address by the Director-General Jacques Diouf
at Dansk Landbrugspresse

Copenhagen, 6 June 2005

Mr Chairman,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to be in Denmark once again, in this country with a deep and long-standing tradition of solidarity and support to the United Nations. I am particularly happy to have been able to accept the kind invitation of Dansk Landbrugspresse and its Chairperson, Torsten Buhl.

It is my hope that this international conference will encourage discussions on the role of journalists with regard to the global food balance.

Mr Chairman,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Our planet produces sufficient food, and yet 852 million women, men and children go to bed hungry each night. Ninety-five per cent of these people live in the developing world, mostly in rural areas, and are dependent upon agriculture for their survival.

For over half a century, FAO has been working actively to alleviate hunger and poverty by promoting agricultural development, improved nutrition and food security, so as to give all people access, at all times, to the food they need to lead an active and healthy life.

At the World Food Summit in 1996, world leaders made a solemn commitment to reduce the number of hungry by half to 400 million, by 2015. This was subsequently reaffirmed at the Millennium Summit and in the Millennium Development Goals. We have only ten years left to achieve this objective and we are falling short of the pace needed to meet this goal. At the present rate of progress, this will only be achieved in 2150.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals is the responsibility of us all; and agriculture and rural development have a fundamental role to play in the process. To this effect, integrating agriculture in poverty reduction strategies is amongst FAO’s main priorities. The Organization has been assisting Governments to draw upon lessons learnt from pertinent experiences and for these to be included in the national policies, placing people at the heart of the macroeconomic and microeconomic development policies.

In order to fight hunger and achieve food security, action must be taken on two fronts, simultaneously. Investments in agricultural development are essential to ensure the sustainable economic development needed in order to guarantee the necessary food availability, employment and income. In addition, special attention must be given to the poorest households and especially to the more vulnerable groups, the women and children, in order to provide them with a balanced diet. In most developing countries, agriculture continues to be the main means of subsistence of the population. It is therefore important to increase and diversify the production of the small farmers. In addition, in view of the accelerating process of urbanization, there is an increased need to develop urban and peri-urban agriculture, to create employment opportunities and respond to an increasing demand of fresh food stuffs in the urban areas.

The mid-term review of progress made, to this effect, will take place next year and, in this connection, FAO's latest report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World, FAOs annual hunger report, highlights three observations:

The number of hungry people in the developing countries dropped by only 9 million during the decade following the World Food Summit baseline period of 1990-1992. During the second half of that decade, that number actually increased by almost 4 million each year, thus wiping out two-thirds of the reduction of 27 million recorded in the previous five years.

However, a large number of countries have shown that success is possible. More than 30 developing countries, with a total population exceeding 2.2 billion people, have reduced their population of undernourished by 25 per cent, representing significant progress towards the World Food Summit goal.

Finally, for every year in which no progress is made, 5 million children lose their lives while the developing countries lose billions of dollars due to loss of productivity and earnings.

If hunger persists at its current levels, it will cause death and disability in the developing countries, and a related loss of productivity, the economic direct cost of which adds up to roughly US$30 billion per year.

Mr Chairman,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Our planet has the potential to nourish all people. We have the means to free people from hunger. We know how to fight hunger. It must be achieved by involving people in the process for poverty reduction and growth; that is, by helping small-scale farmers to safeguard their crops against the uncertainties of the weather, by giving them the means to control water, the source of life, through small-scale water harvesting, irrigation and drainage systems; by mobilizing local labour; and by teaching them simple, inexpensive and efficient ways to increase crop productivity, and diversify animal production, fisheries and aquaculture. The transfer of relevant and adapted technology, also within the framework of south-south cooperation, access to modern inputs, tools and credit, and the possibility to store and sell products, are amongst the available means to help free people from hunger.

This leads me to refer to the on-going public debate on the potential and limits of biotechnology, a debate which has become intense and, for certain types of biotechnology, also emotionally charged. As journalists, you play a crucial role in communicating the often complex scientific findings and stimulating rational public dialogue on this important subject, within the overall framework that I have briefly depicted.

On the one hand, we need to underline the different aspects of biotechnology, which do not raise great controversy and, on the other hand, GMOs which are very debatable and emotionally charged issues. FAO recognizes that genetic engineering has the potential to help increase production and productivity in agriculture, forestry and fisheries. However, FAO is also aware of the concern about the potential risks to human and animal health and to the environment posed by GMOs. It therefore supports a science-based evaluation system that would objectively determine the benefits and risks of each individual biotechnology.

Indeed, the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius, an inter-governmental body charged with setting standards to ensure food safety, has agreed on the principles and guidelines for assessing health risks related to foods derived from modern biotechnology. Some have argued that genetically modified organisms can play a major role in fighting world hunger. GMOs are, however, not the priority for reducing the number of hungry people by half by 2015.

People in developing countries suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition because they lack water, other inputs and credit to produce food, employment and income to access food. Lack of political will and financial resources are today’s main obstacles to resolving the world’s hunger problem.

Factors such as the availability of freshwater play a more important role for sustainable food production. Around 80 per cent of food crises are related in some way to water, and in particular to drought. Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, only 4 per cent of the arable land is irrigated - using only 1.6 per cent of its available water resources ­ compared to 40 per cent in Asia. This defies all logic.

Certainly, genetic engineering can speed up conventional breeding programmes and may offer solutions where other methods have been less successful. Genetic engineering could improve yields on marginal lands and reduce reliance on toxic chemicals in pesticides. It could also improve the nutritional content of food; for example, genetically engineered beta carotene, when it becomes competitive with other sources in fruits and vegetables, would improve the health of many of the world’s poor through the provision of provitamin A.

But the so called Gene Revolution is primarily driven by the multinational private sector with a strong emphasis on commercial products for large markets in North America and Europe.

The resulting technologies are held under exclusive patents and are mostly sold commercially, contrary to those generated in the Green Revolution by the international agricultural research centers under the Consultative Group on Agricultural Research, which provided free public goods that could be used or adapted at no cost by the National Agricultural Research Systems of developing countries. This has important implications for the kind of research that is being undertaken, for the products that are being developed and for their accessibility to poor farmers. Except for a few initiatives, there are no major public or private sector programmes that tackle the critical problems of the poor or target crops and animals that they rely on.

FAO believes that efforts should be made to ensure that developing countries, in general, benefit more from training in the basic sciences and techniques of biotechnological research, while continuing to have access to a diversity of sources of genetic material. FAO proposes that this need be addressed through an increase in public funding of national agricultural research systems and through dialogue between the public and private sectors.

Another important issue that will be dealt with in more detail by my fellow speaker, Ambassador Tim Groser, is trade liberalization and its impact on agricultural production in developing countries.

Food and agricultural trade is vital for food security, poverty alleviation and growth. Food imports contribute vitally to the provision of minimum supplies of basic food stuffs in many of the poorest countries; and agricultural exports are an important source of foreign exchange earnings and rural income in many developing countries.

However, growth in world agricultural trade (4.8 per cent annually between 1981 and 2000), has continued to lag behind the growth in total merchandise trade (7.4 per cent over the same period), and the share of developing countries in global agricultural exports has stayed roughly constant throughout.

FAO projections indicate a continued rising trend in net food imports of developing countries upto the year 2030. The 49 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have seen a rise in their food import bills compared to their total merchandise exports, from about 45 per cent in the late 1980s to an average of nearly 70 per cent in the late 1990s. This makes it increasingly more difficult for many of these countries to pay for their food imports.

As many LDCs depend primarily on agriculture for their economic development, unless they substantially increase their domestic and international competitiveness in agricultural products, they are bound to depend on aid, or become indebted, and risk facing major food shortages.

If trade is to serve as an engine of economic growth and poverty alleviation, countries in both the North and the South, need to broaden their production base on a fair and competitive basis. An enormous and untapped agricultural potential exists in developing countries, to meet the challenges of hunger and poverty. A renewed focus on effective North-South co-operation for the efficient use of the available resources is needed. The challenge is to ensure high quality and safety of food, plant, and animal health, in light of the increased risks of trans-boundary transmission of diseases in a more globalized and liberalized trading system.

Up to now, the impact on food security of the Uruguay Agreement on Agriculture in developing countries has not been positive, leading to the confrontations in Seattle and the failure of Cancun. The follow-up to the Doha round should lead to a more level playing field in international agricultural trade, where rich countries do not provide around one billion dollars per day of support to their farmers, representing only around 5 per cent of their population, while developing countries, where the rural populations represent more than 60 per cent of the total, suffer from high tariffs and technical barriers to trade in trying to access the markets of the North.

Mr Chairman,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

The 30 developing countries that are on track to reach the World Food Summit goal have recorded an average annual increase of agricultural GDP of 3.2 per cent, which is almost one full percentage point higher than the developing countries as a whole.

This is not surprising if we consider that 70 per cent of the world's poor and hungry live in rural areas in developing countries and depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Agricultural development is vital for poverty alleviation and for access to sufficient food.

The Anti-Hunger Programme that was developed by FAO for the World Food Summit: five years later takes a practical look at the investment needed to make agriculture more dynamic and vibrant. It proposes a twin-track approach: first, resource mobilization for agricultural and rural development to create opportunities for the poor and the undernourished to raise their income and enhance their work through competitive production, and; second, measures aimed at meeting the immediate food and nutrition needs of the seriously undernourished.

The approach of the Anti-Hunger Programme should also serve as a model of operation at different levels to achieve the first of the Millennium Development Goals, namely to eradicate poverty and hunger.

This is also the approach of the Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS). Launched by FAO in 1994, this programme is now operational in 110 countries where it seeks to improve small scale water control, farming systems diversification and agricultural productivity through its various complementary components. Those countries which adopted the SPFS early on are now extending the pilot phase activities to a large-scale expansion phase and to National Programmes of Food Security. Since it was launched, the SPFS has helped to mobilize more than US$700 million, with more than half of this sum committed by the developing countries themselves.

The SPFS also reaches out through the Regional Programmes for Food Security which focus on the development of regional and international trade and, in particular, on the enhanced capacity for quality standards and regulations for the protection of plant and animal health. FAO has helped 20 regional economic organizations throughout the world to prepare their own food security programme.

Since as early as 1961, the Government of Denmark has contributed towards improving agricultural output and generating more food in the developing world, by sponsoring fertilizing programmes in Africa and Asia. The Government of Denmark has also generously sponsored important dairy projects in Africa in recent years.

I hope that my participation here today will contribute towards further strengthening the close cooperation that already exists between the world’s oldest national guild of agricultural journalists and FAO.

Journalists can play a vital role in the fight against hunger. Without you, our message would not reach the public at large. The better informed you are, the more effective our message will be in achieving a world without hunger.

I thank you for your attention and wish you a lively and productive exchange of views and experiences.

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