Achieving the World Food Summit
and Millennium Development Goals

Address to the Management and Staff
of the International Crop Research Institute (ICRISAT)

Patancheru, India, 4 January 2006

Director-General, Dr William Dar,
Members of the Institute,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to be here and share with you FAO’s efforts and vision for attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the World Food Summit (WFS) target.

At the WFS in 1996, world leaders agreed to reduce the number of hungry people by half, by 2015. This objective was subsequently affirmed by the Millennium Summit and included in the first MDG. The reduction of hunger and extreme poverty is critical in order to achieve the other MDGs.

World leaders gathered in New York in September 2005 to review the progress made towards meeting the MDGs. There is now overwhelming evidence that without much stronger commitment and rapid progress most of the MDGs, particularly MDG-1, will not be achieved. In fact, at the present pace only South America and the Caribbean could reach the MDG 1 and WFS goal.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Sixty years ago, FAO was founded on the premise that peace and freedom from hunger are interdependent. There has been a remarkable achievement in food production and today enough food is produced to feed everyone. There are, however, still 852 million undernourished people in the world, of which 815 million are in developing countries. More than half of the total undernourished, 61 percent, is found in Asia and the Pacific, followed by sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for nearly 25 percent of the total. The highest proportion of the population that is undernourished is found in sub-Saharan Africa, estimated by FAO to be 33 percent. This is double the 16 percent undernourished estimated for Asia and the Pacific and 10 percent estimated for both Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Near East and North Africa regions.

The battle against hunger and poverty will have to be won in the rural areas of developing countries where three-quarters of the 1.1 billion people living on less than one dollar a day live and depend on agriculture. FAO, through the Anti-Hunger Programme, developped during the World Food Summit: five years later held in 2002, has taken a two-pronged approach to address this challenge. The first one focuses on policies and investment in rural areas and agriculture to improve the productivity of smallholders and to create employment opportunities for the rural poor. The second approach is the direct and immediate access to food for the most vulnerable groups providing context-specific assistance.

In 1994 FAO launched the Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS) as a flagship programme to reduce hunger and malnutrition by increasing the productivity of small farmers. Initially, the SPFS concentrates on small-scale projects that focus on demonstrating to farmers in pilot sites, the benefits of simple, low-cost changes in technologies in the areas of water control, crop intensification, diversification of agricultural production, and on identifying constraints for the wider adoption of these technologies. The SPFS is now operational in 105 countries. An important complementary initiative of the SPFS is the South-South Cooperation (SSC), where experts from countries like India are actively assisting other developing countries in the transfer of technologies and solutions adapted to local conditions. An example is the treadmill pump irrigation, which originated in Asia and is now extensively used in Africa. FAO is encouraged by the increasing number of countries (currently 25) that are now up-scaling the pilot SPFS activities into national food security programmes.

The immediate focus in meeting the MDGs and the WFS goal should be on overcoming the most basic constraints (lack of water, inputs, credits, basic rural infrastructures, and degradation of natural resources) faced by small-scale farmers who constitute the vast number of the world's poor. This is particularly relevant in semi-arid areas which are home to around 45 percent of the world’s hungry people.

There can be no reliable and productive agriculture without the control of water. Around 80 percent of the world's food crises are linked to water shortage The CGIAR system played a major role in the development of the Green Revolution in Asia, which has lifted millions of people from hunger. The limited gain of sub-Saharan Africa from the Green Revolution is partly explained by the fact that only 7 percent of Africa’s arable land is irrigated (4 percent in sub-Saharan Africa) compared to 40 percent in Asia. Irrigated cropping currently covers 20 percent of global arable land but accounts for 40 percent of total food output. By 2030, agriculture will have to feed an additional two billion people and this will rest essentially on investments in the control of water. In the immediate and short term, focus should on small-scale and affordable irrigation development aimed at improving the productivity of smallholders.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

An outstanding issue in the battle against hunger and poverty and the overall attainment of the MDGs is the renewed political commitment and the pledge for increased resources through a combination of public and private sources. Over the past twenty years, official development assistance (ODA) for agriculture and the rural sector has declined by more than 50 percent, from an average of US$5.14 billion per year to US$2.2 billion. Lending from international financial institutions has also decreased. The Report of the Commission for Africa and this year's G-8 Summit have, rightly, called for donors to increase development aid, including doubling aid to Africa.

The political commitment of national governments to allocate adequate funds to the agricultural sector is vital. Aware of this fact, African Heads of State and Government adopted the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security in July 2003, which embraced the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). FAO is closely associated with the formulation of the CAADP, which is based on four pillars: 1) land and water management; 2) rural infrastructure and trade-related capacities for market access; 3) increasing food supply and reducing hunger; and 4) agricultural research and technology dissemination and adoption. The Heads of State and Government also agreed to increase national budgetary resources allocated to agriculture and rural development to at least 10 percent within 5 years.

Investment in agriculture and rural development should go hand in hand with investments in agricultural sciences and research and technology development, whose rates of return generally exceed 30 percent per year. However, public spending on agricultural research has been falling; in Africa, it has fallen from 0.8 percent of agricultural GDP in the 1980s to 0.3 percent in the 1990s. ECOSOC recommends increasing national expenditures in research and technology to at least 1 percent of GDP.

FAO intends to increase its support to the National Agricultural Research and Extension Systems (NARES) whose role is crucial if the MDGs and WFS goal are to be met. In many developing countries, NARES have not been very effective in generation and dissemination of relevant technologies to farmers. This is mainly due to weak linkages among research and extension institutions and farmers; risk aversion in adoption of new technologies; lack of integration of technology with the production system; and lack of funding for staff and programmes.

In order to overcome this constraint, a shift in the agricultural research and technology development and transfer paradigm is needed: from a single commodity and mono-disciplinary base to a farming system and a multidisciplinary based approach; from a top-down extension model to a participatory approach to technology assessment and adoption; as well as greater efforts to improve the productivity and efficiency of women farmers. In facilitating this paradigm, focus should be on strengthening linkages between research, extension and farmers; promoting mechanisms for the adoption of field proven technologies; prompting public-private partnerships to improve access to inputs and service supply to farmers; diversifying sources of income for agricultural research and technology to ensure financial sustainability; and incorporating local knowledge in technology generation and adoption.

The CGIAR should continue to play an important role in supporting NARES, to ensure that affordable and appropriate technologies are available to farmers. The role and experience of ICRISAT in arid and semi-arid tropics where such basic technologies are needed will be extremely helpful.

FAO has a long and rich history of cooperation with research institutions. The Organization’s most important partner in this category is the CGIAR and its 15 International Agriculture Research Centres (IARC). FAO’s commitment to the CGIAR is reflected in its continued financial support despite decreases in its own budget.

FAO participates in the system-level governance as a CGIAR co-sponsor together with the World Bank and UNDP. The Organization is a permanent member of the Executive Council and hosts the Secretariat of the Science Council. Its involvement in centre-level governance is reflected in constitutional membership on the board of trustees of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) and regular participation in meetings of other centres’ boards. CGIAR-FAO linkages also involve parallel participation in key intergovernmental bodies and interagency groups concerned with policy development and activities in sectors and on issues of common interest.

FAO's activities of a strategic nature often involve the participation of the IARCs, for example, their role in the maintenance of germplasm collections. In 1994, the IARCs signed agreements with FAO to host collections of plant germplasm under the auspices of FAO as part of the international network of ex situ collections. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, adopted by the FAO Conference in November 2002 and in force since June 2004, gives a safe and long-term legal footing to the ex situ collections held in trust by the IARCs. The Treaty, recognizing the importance of the collections, ensures that the plant genetic resources maintained in the collections are made available for access; regulates the material transfers and maintenance; and provides for the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust, which supports an endowment that will fund in perpetuity the urgent and chronic financial shortages that face the world’s most important collections of crop diversity, is a joint initiative of IPGRI and FAO.

FAO and ICRISAT have collaborated, inter alia, in the improvement of the national plant breeding capacities, particularly for the improvement of pearl millet and seed production; gender dimensions in the adoption of technologies; and establishment of farmer field schools in Zimbabwe. Collaboration can be expanded to incorporate water control issues particularly in semi-arid areas.

In light of the ongoing CGIAR reform, efforts should be made to avoid any overlap in the roles and activities of IARCs and development agencies, while focusing on those areas that will promote complementarities.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The target set to reduce hunger and extreme poverty by half, and make substantial improvement in education, health, social equity, environmental sustainability and international partnership will not be met in ten years from now with a "business as usual" approach. World leaders have expressed new determination to reinvigorate efforts and accelerate progress towards meeting these goals. Translating these into action will require, among other things, the political will of national governments to commit an adequate budget to revitalize the agriculture and rural sector as well as for developed countries to fulfil their pledge to increase development assistance.

Let me reiterate that the Organization stands ready to contribute vigorously to ending hunger which is enshrined in its Constitution and strengthen the partnership with the CGIAR.

I thank you for your kind attention.

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