UN Reform – the Specialized Agencies must change too

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – FAO – will soon be celebrating its 60th birthday. It was founded with the aim of ensuring humanity’s freedom from hunger. Yet although the world now has abundant food supplies and the private sector has all the capacity needed to ensure the efficient transport and distribution of food within an increasingly free global trading system, there are still 852 million under-nourished people, mainly in developing countries. One in every seven humans still faces a life drastically foreshortened by lack of adequate food from the day of they are born.

The agriculture sector is still called upon to produce more and more crops, meat and fish as well as fibres to meet the ever-growing demands of a swelling world population, expected to grow from six to nine billion over the next 30 years. It must do this in ways that make sustainable use of natural resources, leaving land and water, forests and oceans intact to meet the needs of future generations.

There is no doubt, however, that as one of the oldest UN Specialized Agencies, FAO needs to respond decisively to the situation in which the whole UN system finds itself, facing calls for fundamental reform. Along with other UN bodies, FAO needs to cut its overheads, speed up its responses, avoid duplication, drop activities which others can do better and strengthen its actions in areas in which it has an acknowledged comparative advantage.

Therefore, steps are now being taken to begin a far-reaching process of reform in FAO. If endorsed by the member countries in November this year, the reforms will adapt it to the fast-moving changes taking place in the wider development cooperation environment. It will thus respond better to the high expectations of developed as well as developing countries.

The need is as strong as ever for an international organization that makes it possible for governments of all nations to come together in a neutral forum to negotiate food and agriculture agreements of global concern. Helping countries apply the food standards generated through cooperation with the World Health Organization to protect consumers is a vital area of concentration. The development of international trade in agricultural products increasingly relies on these standards to ensure that national rules and regulations do not become technical barriers to market entry.

Indeed, there is a compelling case for strengthening FAO’s capacity to operate in a number of priority areas. These include helping member countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, especially the goal of reducing by half the incidence of hunger by 2015.

FAO is revisiting its priorities and will reorganize itself to improve its ability to address global problems of tremendous significance to farmers; issues such as migratory pests like locusts, quelea birds and armyworms, which move in great numbers without respect for borders, destroying the crops that fall in their path and leaving millions of hapless farmers deprived of their food supplies and livelihoods. Each year the global economy loses billions of dollars because of crop and livestock diseases, many of which can be prevented at a relatively low cost.

Increasingly frequent agricultural emergencies have shown the importance of coordinating an effective international response to periodic droughts and floods, hurricanes and tsunamis. Affected countries look to FAO for support in developing national strategies for the rehabilitation of productive capacities to bring back employment and income. There are also serious public concerns about the potentially catastrophic effects of diseases such as Avian Influenza, which has already caused the death of 60 people and the loss of 140 million chickens.

FAO will also be refocusing on capacity building, through increasing its training and institution strengthening activities. It will draw not only on the traditional sources of assistance from the North but also expand its South-South cooperation programme, tapping into the substantial pool of expertise in technical and socio-economic aspects of agriculture that now exists in developing countries.

Change is never easy, but it is essential for FAO to continue to play its part, within a reformed UN system and at a reasonable cost, in ensuring humanity’s freedom from hunger.

September 2005

Published in Dallas Morning News (USA) and ABC (Spain) among other newspapers