ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment – Opening Session Remarks by Dr. QU Dongyu, Director-General
by Dr QU Dongyu, FAO Director-General
11/06/2020
ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment – Opening Session
9 June 2020
Remarks by
Dr. QU Dongyu, Director-General
Thank you vice-president, can you hear me?
Thank you also dear Mark and ladies and gentlemen, excellencies, representatives of the Members.
In FAO we work for the vulnerable people, for the poor and for the farmers.
We appreciate the leadership of the UN system, the SG and the UNSG and the other colleagues, to support the farmers and the poor.
The COVID-19 pandemic poses a clear and present danger to food security and nutrition, especially to the world’s most vulnerable communities.
FAO’s initial and ongoing assessments tell us that almost all countries with existing food crises have seen food prices rising and wages dropping.
This is reducing people’s access to food
But, in these countries we are also seeing the beginning of production-side issues that will impact on food availability.
We are getting increased reports that the farmers are unable to access labor, for the harvesting or for the planting, depending on the season.
And they are facing problems transporting productive inputs to their farms, or getting their produce to markets for sale.
Which entails reducing their capacity to purchase inputs for the next season.
So, increasingly farmers are unable to invest in the next planting season, and so food availability is emerging as a major crisis.
According to the FAO estimates as much as 80.2 million people could face hunger in net food importing countries due to the reduction in economic growth.
This is particularly alarming in countries experiencing active humanitarian emergencies.
This is why during the past months I had very intense collaboration with Mark Lowcock, my close supporter.
In these countries, rural food producers are among the most vulnerable.
And among these already vulnerable groups, rural women are being particularly affected by the pandemic as mentioned by the UNICEF Executive.
Women represent a large majority of informal traders, food processors, and backyard producers.
They have been first to lose their incomes, have less access to safety nets and productive resources, including land and financial services.
At the same time, they bear the heaviest burden for caring for children and elderly and sick household older members, as well as for household nutrition and health care.
So even in the richest countries, women are expected to face greater earnings gaps and worse socio-economic outcomes.
In humanitarian countries [experiencing active humanitarian emergencies], these inequalities are magnified.
Unless the humanitarian system provides targeted support to women, progress made in gender equity will be severely undermined by the pandemic.
Assessments are taking place at country level to assemble more detailed evidence.
The latest analyses conducted using the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, (it’s called IPC), indicate that COVID-19 impacts, in combination with response measures, have caused an immediate increase in the scale and severity of acute hunger.
Especially in countries already experiencing high levels of acute hunger, like Afghanistan, the Central African Republic and Somalia, where acute hunger has now reached levels higher than those in 2017, when famine loomed.
Every day, we are assembling more evidence, and the picture of the threat keeps getting clearer and clearer.
We risk a looming food crisis unless measures are taken fast to protect the most vulnerable, keep global food supply chains alive and mitigate the pandemic’s impacts across the food system.
In just an hour or so, the Secretary-General will issue a new policy brief on COVID-19 and food insecurity, along with a call for urgent collective action, to pre-empt the multiple threads facing food security and agriculture livelihoods.
We have to be smart in how we do this.
Because the impact of the pandemic and containment measures are affecting different parts of the food supply chain in different ways, depending on the timing and seasonality.
Rapid interventions to safeguard livelihoods now can pre-empt and mitigate any further deteriorations in food security and will therefore save lives and reduce humanitarian costs in the future.
But I see that we have a problem.
Livelihoods are largely being ignored so far in the response to the pandemic.
We cannot continue to have the same argument as to whether livelihood support counts as life-saving or as “humanitarian”.
Because livelihoods assistance has repeatedly been demonstrated to be both cost-effective and life-saving.
So why are we waiting for already critical situations to worsen?
And so I repeat: saving livelihoods is a crucial part of that humanitarian response, and must be part of the response from day one.
We must ensure that we reach the most vulnerable, even in the hard-to-reach rural areas like those where FAO has been working for decades.
And we have to be sure that family farmers and rural businesses, especially those led by women and young people get the right kind of help.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the major food security challenges we have seen in a long while.
So, the pandemic is drawing attention to the extreme vulnerability of millions or billions even of people.
You can see our best estimates those already facing crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity expanding rapidly as little as three months additional 130 million people, may join the ranks of people living in extreme poverty, sooner or later, we do not know, I hope it is later.
Today the Secretary-General will challenge all of us, to work together to transform our food systems in order to build a more inclusive and sustainable world.
Because our food systems too often hurt the environment that all of us depend on.
So the opportunity to act boldly and with purpose and urgency, responding to immediate needs, but also building rural people resilience to shocks and disasters which are getting more and more frequent.
Only through the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus will we be able to ensure a better future, for us all.
So let’ s work together, contribute together for the vulnerable people, no matter if women, children, especially in the countryside.
Thank you.