World
Food
Summit

13-17 November 1996 - Rome, Italy

1. The Regional NGO Consultation for Asia and the Pacific on the World Food Summit was held in Bangkok, Thailand, on 29 and 30 April 1996. It was organized jointly by the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific and the Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ANGOC), in collaboration with the other NGO networks of the region. The Consultation was attended by 101 representatives of NGOs from 18 countries in Asia (Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Hongkong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam). The programme of the Consultation is attached as Appendix 1. The list of participants is given in Appendix 2.

2. The Consultation discussed two main WFS documents: "the Draft Policy Statement and Plan of Action" (APRC/96/3) and "World Food Summit: Food Security Situation and Issues in Asia and the Pacific" (APRC/96/4). In addition, all participants were provided with a set of the WFS technical background documents so far issued in provisional form, a set of past NGO declarations on the World Food Summit and its themes, and a copy of the programme of action of the Popular Coalition to Eradicate Hunger and Poverty.

3. Following the general introduction and a panel discussion, the participants organised themselves into the following five thematic working groups related to the commitments of the Draft Policy Statement and Plan of Action as well as to the actions envisaged in the document on "Food Security Situation and Issues in Asia and the Pacific":

1. Role of Civil Society, People's Participation and Gender Equity;
2. Empowerment through Access to Resources;
3. Food Emergencies/Preparedness;
4. Sustainable Paths to Food Security;
5. Trade and Investment.

4. Each working group produced a report which was discussed in plenary sessions and which served for the preparation of the Declaration which was adopted in the evening of 30 April. The reports can be made available by the Summit Secretariat on request. The text of the adopted Declaration follows.

1. During the two last decades, we have witnessed governments from both North and South come together in United Nations and other international conferences to make solemn commitments to advance, among others, sustainable development and food security. These commitments were incurred in the light of the reality that there is more than enough food to go around to feed the world's peoples. However, more than 20 years after the First World Food Conference where it was declared that the elimination of hunger was just a few years away, there are more hungry people, there are more poor farmers, and agriculture is in a worse state.

2. The current crisis of agriculture and farming communities throughout the South stems from the exacerbation of existing poverty and inequity by three major trends:

First, the promotion of Green Revolution technology without regard for its social and ecological consequences;

Second, the submission of agriculture and farming communities to strategies aimed at rapid urban industrialization;

Third, the dissolution of small farming households owing to indiscriminate liberalization policies allowing the entry and dominance of extremely powerful multinational agribusinesses.

While there have been local initiatives in sustainable smallholder and communitybased agriculture, these have been relatively few in number and overwhelmed by these larger forces.

3. Unless appropriate strategies are devised and urgently implemented, our farming communities face extinction and food insecurity will become a permanent condition for all.

4. Democratic control of the food system is the ultimate test of democracy. Food security cannot be ensured by entrusting agriculture, food production and trade to global markets. Land, water, biodiversity, and traditional/intellectual practices, which are the vital resources that make food security possible, should stay under the democratic control of those who produce the food and local communities themselves, with special emphasis on establishing mechanisms to ensure the participation of women at all levels of the decisionmaking processes.

5. Therefore, a new social contract needs to be established among Asian farmers, Asian peoples and Asian governments. This social contract must be peoplederived, peopleled, and peoplemanaged. It must be centred on a vision at the centre of which is the integrity of local farming communities and the food security of the national community. It must be implemented via strategies that promote socialequity, ecological sustainability, people's empowerment and gender balance. Finally, this social contract must include policies aimed at immediately countering the negative impact of forces and institutions that promote food insecurity, like the GATT Agricultural Accord and the policies of international financial institutions.

6. Of major concern to us are five major dimensions of rural integrity and food security:

6.1 Role of Civil Society, People's Participation and Gender Equity

1. A clear definition of the civil society is needed to ensure social, economic and political space for small farmers, youth, women and other marginalized groups.
   Primarily, the civil society should include public interest groups, people's organizations and NGOs whose prime concern should be the marginalized groups.
2. For the most part, the FAO documents have failed to focus on the concerns that have been raised for the last few decades and bypassed the commitments made by the governments in the last international conferences (e.g., WCARRD, Rome, 1979; World Human Rights Conference, Vienna, 1992; Earth Summit, Rio, 1992; ICPD, Cairo, 1994; WSSD, Copenhagen, 1995; and FWCW, Beijing, 1995).
3. The FAO documents, just like in the past, have placed unjust and undue emphasis on the same growth model focusing on trade liberalization and marketdominated production processes that the civil society has been critiquing for the last few decades.
4. The FAO documents on the World Food Summit (WFS) should be rewritten in terms of the Rio Commitments, the Biodiversity Convention, the Climate Convention, the Code of Conduct on the Use and Distribution of Pesticides, and the WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes to reflect these concerns and commitments.
5. Food is a human right. People need the food to be available, accessible, power to access it and the freedom of choice with regard to the food they produce and consume. Decentralized and democratic systems of food production and distribution are essential to people's participation in food security. In order to achieve gender equity, food security needs to be seen through women s eyes; harmony with nature and against hierarchies of any kind. In short, food security must be built upon the basic principles of respect for the rights of small farmers and concern and caring for others and the environment; cooperation and mutuality; a concern for the preservation of life; and the building and propagating of a sense of sufficiency, with a new concept of the good life which is based upon satisfying human relations rather than profit. These principles put nature, women, youth, children and thepreservation of life at the centre, not the maximisation of profit.
6. Accountability of the state and market should be ensured through appropriate mechanisms and monitoring plans. Certain types of code of conduct for MNCs/TNCs should be devised and followed.

   ACTION AGENDA

7. Challenge the whole development paradigm that continues to ignore farmers, women, youth and other marginalized groups and focuses on a growth model that can never bring about change towards achieving sustainable development, social justice and gender equity.
8. Develop, support and propagate current alternative models and further explorations in other new paradigms which place people's participation, gender equity and sustainability before profit, trade and market forces.
9. Work towards the transformation of exploitative structures and all forms of hierarchies (e.g., race, class, caste, northsouth, etc) in order to bring forward the voices of marginalized and vulnerable groups and to facilitate the creation of institutional mechanisms/processes for ensuring their participation.
10. To facilitate establishment of farmers' organizations in order to guarantee the primacy of the farmers in production, and their right to be in the decisionmaking processes with special effort and mechanisms for the participation of women who make up the majority of farmers in Asia.
11. Develop and prioritize programmes which recognise the centrality of women's role in ensuring food security for their families and communities at all levels of the food security chain.
12. Promote local farming, fisherfolk and indigenous communities and the strengthening of cooperative and mutually beneficial forms of organization and production with mechanisms and structures to ensure their participation in decisionmaking processes and policies.
13. Recognise, preserve and enhance the use of indigenous knowledge and practices.
14. Develop policies to resolve the debt burden and restructuring trade to make it a truly fair process.
15. Reaffirm the strong conviction that food is the basic human right that supersedes property rights, commercial advantage, free trade and the dictates of the market.
16. Effective agrarian reforms which consolidate access, ownership, control and management of resources by small farmers. This must include the right of women to land and resources and the protection of coastal and agrarian lands against incursion of urban, industrial and tourist development.
17. Sustainable agriculture policies and strategies with time bound targets for ensuring their implementation.
18. Restructuring the processes and mechanisms of people's participation in Government, FAO and other international bodies plans, strategies and programmes to insure input in all phases of the process.
19. Promote and ensure national and international accountability mechanisms for the MNCs/TNCs and big agribusinesses.

6.2 Empowerment through access to resources

1. The current agricultural paradigm tends to uphold and legitimize largescale, ecologically destructive, exportoriented production, and places profit ahead of people's nutrition and welfare. It emphasizes the role of corporations, markets and technology,rather than recognizes the integral role of farmers and primary food producers and consumers, especially women, as the real pillars of food security.
2. A new social contract must address the root causes of disempowerment and create an enabling policy environment that recognizes and builds upon the rights and capacities of primary food producers. Food security must be, and can only be, built upon social justice.

   We urge action on the following points:

3. Governments and multilateral institutions must honour their commitments made under previous international agreements, particularly WCARRD and Agenda 21, and schedules and measures of compliance must be instituted.
4. Genuine agrarian reform that ensures farmer's right and control over productive resources must immediately be implemented, recognizing especially the equal rights of women to land and other resources. New policies must be instituted that stress community rights, control and management over water and common property resources. People's rights to selforganize must be recognized and protected.
5. Research and technology systems must build upon the role of farmers as scientists, as the main source of all intellectual innovation in agriculture. Current agricultural research, technology development and extension tend to be heavily centralized and privatized, due to systems of intellectual property rights and corporate protectionism. These policies must be changed.
6. We denounce violent efforts undertaken by states and local oligarchies to suppress the efforts by farmers, fisherfolk, and forest dwellers to exercise their legitimate rights to control their resources and advance their interests.
7. If current trends towards food insecurity are to be reversed, democratic mechanisms must be institutionalized for adequate and meaningful civil society participation, especially on the part of small producers.

6.3 Food Emergencies/Preparedness

1. Food emergencies arise from, one, natural and, two, humanmade disasters. A third slow onset but no less menacing disaster is derived from contamination of entire ecosystems, specifically, its natural proteinsourcing and other foodproductive capacities.
2. Immediately, floods, typhoons, droughts, earthquakes, civil conflict, extensive use of land mines, shifting from farming for staple food to market systems, heavy external input and use of toxic agricultural chemicals, etc., increase the vulnerability of the food insecure communities. Worse, structural adjustment programs imposed by international financial institutions, food or agricultural accords, lack of transport, communications and distribution infrastructures, and reduction of commitments by donors in food and food related assistance, complete the intensifying vulnerability of both rural and urban households.
3. In certain areas, land mines constitute a major hindrance to food production, and measures must be taken to outlaw the use of land mines and urgent programs initiated to remove them.
4. Governments must recognize and build local capacities to facilitate recovery and mitigate the aftermath of disasters. That emergency assistance must incorporate, both, disaster response and mitigation components at local level. Aid here must not include the dumping of pesticides and other components of chemical intensive agriculture. Quality and proactive food aid commitments and actual availability must increase in favour of building local food security. Investments in disaster mitigation and preparedness of households remain the most costeffective use of emergency assistance. As much as possible, local supplies should be tapped in emergencies, so as to reduce dependency or external aid.
5. Communitybased food reserves must be established, in addition to national and regional food reserves. Governments must soon establish policies and enable operational requisites, like farmercooperativebased procurement and distribution systems.
6. FAO, for its part, must actively encourage governments to act upon the establishment of sustainable production systems according to local, geoclimatic conditions such as the use of appropriate and disastertolerant planting materials and seeds and promotion of lowexternal input farming systems. It is imperative that experiences in this regard are further empowered by an information exchange system between communities, and between countries.
7. Any insurance and other mechanisms to stabilize farmers incomes and reduce uncertainty in production must be instituted.
8. Loss of food in transportation or storage must be reduced through innovative initiatives.
9. NGOs, cooperatives and victims organizations must be preferred channels of both multilateral and bilateral food aid, therefore assuring integrity in the delivery and accountability. The reinforced focus on household food security must precede macro food security. Food and nutrition of those most vulnerable such as widows, children, womenheaded households, homebased informal sector workers, is priority.
10. The use of foods as a political weapon, such as food blockades of countries and communities, must be strongly opposed.
11. Governments must promote exchange of information between the food insecure, specifically the farming population. Levels and locations of food inventories and establishing early warning systems created and operated by local populations including progressive risk and hazard mapping must be a part of increased disaster preparedness.
12. FAO and governments must encourage and actually implement debt for rehabilitation swaps in collaboration with peoples organizations and cooperatives.
13. Lastly, adverse disaster impacts are a question of increasing vulnerability of communities to food insecurities. Only the advanced populations from present poverty conditions, in conjunction with effective disasterpreparedness plans, may bring ways that assure a reliable food security situation.

6.4 Sustainable Paths to Food Security

1. The globalization of agriculture, like the globalization of the economy and industry, has undermined the biological basis of agriculture. Globalization has also drastically undermined the situation of the small farmer, subjecting him or her to price fluctuations and other volatile trends that are determined by forces far beyond their local horizons.
2. Globalization has intensified pressures to industrialize agriculture and aquaculture, leading to largescale factory farming and the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals. These practices have resulted in adverse health effects, contamination and adulteration of food, pollution of air and water, reduction of biodiversity, and the depletion of soil fertility.
3. Globalization has increased pressures to resort to biotechnology to trigger the Second Green Revolution, with a similar recklessness and lack of concern for social and ecological consequences that accompanied the First Green Revolution.
4. It is time to reintegrate agricultural production into the local ecology. It is time to abandon such technofixes as the Green Revolution. It is time to bring farming once again into control of local communities.
5. In pursuit of these broad goals, we propose the following principles and recommendations on sustainable production.
6. First, while market forces play an important economic function, the market left to itself leads to the dissolution of communities, growth in social inequity, and ecological destruction. Instead of driving and dissolving communities, the market and economy must be placed once again under the control of the community.
7. Second, the concept of sustainable agriculture and agricultural supportsystems must be central to the idea of ensuring food for all, particularly for vulnerable groups.
8. Third, food security must be reconceptualized so as to begin at the moment of conception. Furthermore, since breastfeeding is the key to food security for infants up to six months of age, community and government efforts must be made to bring back and promote breastfeeding practices.
9. Fourth, food security must be conceived in a holistic manner. At present the current model of consumption is plainly unsustainable and unhealthy. The overconsumption of the industrialized nations and local elites perpetuates and increases the disparity between North and South, urban and rural consumption patterns and lifestyles must be fundamentally altered and equitably distributed.
10. Fifth, special attention must be paid to cultural factors that undermine food security programs, such as the present trend of advertising that spreads propaganda about the value of commodities that are associated with western lifestyles shared by local elites, the expansion of which promotes the interests of multinational corporations. Instead, affirmative action must be taken to promote the farmers' viewpoint in the media promoting inherited consumption patterns not based on greed and accumulation.
11. Sixth, special attention must be given to striking an ecologically healthy relationship between the needs of urban consuming communities and agricultural producing communities. This must include strict controls on land use that would ensure that valuable agricultural land is not expropriated for real estate and other development projects.
12. Seventh, environmental costs of agricultural production must be internalized, not only to discourage the rape of the environment but also to eliminate the unfair advantage enjoyed by bigger domestic and foreign producers who enjoy environmental subsidies like cheap stateprovided water.
13. In conclusion, we urge that the FAO documents be radically revised to reflect the aforementioned concerns and principles.

6.5 Trade and Investment

1. With respect to the relationship between food security and trade and investment liberalization, we must start from the premise that international trade is not vital to food security. We must furthermore oppose the inverted priorities of international organizations which evaluates food security as to whether or not it promotes trade and investment liberalization. Instead we must judge trade policy as to whether or not it enhances food security.

   Trade

2. We support a paradigm of food security and trade built on the following principles:
   • selfsufficiency production should be reserved for national producers in both developing and developed countries if they have the capacity to produce commodities in sufficient quantity for the national community; foreign trade should complement, not supplant, national production.
   • equity trade policies should be formulated and implemented with a view to enhancing, not diminishing, social equity.
   • protection of vulnerable groups trade policies should be devised in ways that allows the adoption of special mechanisms that protect vulnerable groups such as family farms and strengthen cooperatives.
   • sustainability trade policies should be formulated and adopted with a view to enhancing, not diminishing, ecological sustainability in both importing and exporting countries.
   • internalization of costs prices of goods should reflect environmental costs, to eliminate the unfair advantage given to multinational agribusiness companies.
3. As immediate measures to counter the negative impact of trade liberalization policies, we urge a freeze on the implementation of further agricultural liberalization until after a thorough study of the impact of the GATT Agricultural Accord and a renegotiation of the Accord based on the conclusions of such a study.
4. In addition, we wish to see countertrade assessed as a model of basic staple food distribution from one country to a neighbouring country without detracting from our preference for communitybased food reserves. We propose an assessment of the necessity of strengthening regional food reserves.

   Investment

5. With respect to investment, both local and foreign, we urge the FAO to adopt a Code of Conduct for agricultural investments that would require that investments comply with the best practice in terms of food safety andecological impact, with a strict process of environmental impact assessment with periodic environmental audits being central to the process.
6. Public investments in agriculture, including those coming from international aid institutions, should be directed at building the capacity of small producers and agricultural systems to be sustainable, including the financing of land and resource reform to benefit small farmers, fisherfolk, women, and indigenous communities. Public investments should not be used to subsidize private corporate activities.
7. Investments in public distribution systems should be continued in order to strengthen the link between food reserves and consumers. Public distribution systems, however, should be reformed to effectively insulate them from political patronage.
8. Investments in research and development should support small agricultural systems and not transnational control of agriculture. Investments in this area should support research that guarantee peer partnership between farmers and scientists.

   Immediate Measures

9. Immediate measures must be taken to prevent the further erosion of food security. In this connection, we further demand that AsiaPacific governments firmly oppose the indiscriminate and binding liberalization initiatives being proposed by some governments in the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).
10. We urge a halt to the coercive, unilateral trade initiatives employed by some powerful governments to undermine the food security of more vulnerable countries.
11. We also wish to express our concern that the FAO's progressive views on food security are increasingly undermined by the organization's acceptance of the emphasis on indiscriminate trade liberalization promoted by the World Trade Organization. We caution the FAO to resist this colonization. We urge the FAO instead to listen to the rising and increasingly organized voices of the poor and marginalized.
12. While critical of the FAO documents and many of the practices of the FAO, we in the NGOs nevertheless welcome its effort to consult the NGO community and people's organizations in the process leading up to the World Food Summit. We ask the FAO to cast its lot with the poor and the marginalized communities of farmers, fisherfolk, and forest dwellers in an expression of faith on the possibility of change. With such a partnership we can turn the World Food Summit from an event legitimizing the corporate subjugation of the countryside and destruction of food security into a historic opportunity to reverse the erosion of food security and the degradation of agriculture.

Appendix 2