Dear All,
First of all I would like to say thank, the CFS for organizing the meeting at Addis Ababa, Julius for his nicely coordinating the discussion and the CSM for invited me to participate in this meeting.
As we have been well discussed, all these ten principles are the outcome of major natural and manmade causes of food insecurity. In my opinion, it is impossible to say these principles are comprehensive.
For instance, one of the major food insecurity problems, rapid population growth rates is not emphasized. Rapid population growth rate is a very critical problem of many developing countries which have very low family planning activities.
What I would like to suggest here is, please try to incorporate and bold the family planning policy issues or concrete sentence should briefly stated in the controlling mechanism of the fast growth rate.
Land is the most critical natural resources to get food and for survival; however, it is decreasing in both size (urbanization, poor land management, investment, etc...) and quality (over cultivation, leaching away by erosion, etc...) time to time. The existing land resource and population size is not balanced. It would be very difficult to minimize or tackle the food insecurity problem in the situation of rapid population growth rate. Therefore, we have to be taken in to account the issues of population pressure.
My second point is directly related to principle 8; the language, ensure multi-year funding may be threats for dependency syndrome. In the detail part of the principle we have to show clearly the resource mobilization and fund raising mechanisms at local level.
In principle 6 we have given more emphasis for conflict (war and occupation). But on the other side of conflict there is also interest conflict between institutions during implementation of various development projects (government, implement agents and donor communities) I do not have idea how do you treat/ incorporate the issue in this principle, but very important point that should be considered. Many projects terminated and facing challenges because of interest conflict.
Many thanks for your time and consideration!
Yared Amare CSM/Ethiopia
Yared Amare