United front on world hunger
UNITED Against Hunger is the theme of World Food Day which takes place today and provides an opportunity to focus on the need for sustained actions to halve world hunger by 2015.
I believe that this huge challenge can be achieved. The political will worldwide is growing. The promises must now be converted into effective partnerships involving governments, civil society groups and the private sector working together.
Hunger is the greatest scourge that the world is facing today. It affects one sixth of the world’s population. Every six seconds a child dies somewhere due to hunger or a hunger-related cause. That’s 10 every minute, 600 every hour.
World hunger on this scale is politically, socially, economically and, in my view, morally unacceptable. Hungry people simply cannot pull themselves out of poverty without being dragged down again and again at the first signs of stress as they try to break out of the really vicious hunger cycle.
In my view, therefore, addressing hunger underpins all the other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2000.
Nearly 14 years ago, in November 1996, when I attended the World Food Summit in Rome, it was invigorating to hear world leaders commit themselves to halving the number of hungry people in the world from 850 million to 425 million by 2015.
Unfortunately, in 2000, when the MDGs were being drafted, the Hunger Goal was lumped in with the Poverty Goal and became expressed as halving the percentage of hungry people in the developing world from 20% to 10% by 2015.
What happened? Quite simply, since 2000, the number of hungry people has gone in the wrong direction. Today, there are close to one billion chronically hungry people — nowhere near the Rome target of 425 million which I had been pleased to witness.
Hunger, agriculture, food and rural development had become unfashionable in development thinking since the nineties. Many people believed that the way to solve hunger was simply by addressing poverty and they ignored the potential of agriculture and food to be vehicles for development (as had happened years ago in most Northern societies). Investment in agriculture and food systems fell to dangerously low levels, with attention lurching from one crisis to the next.
The Irish Government Hunger Task Force, which launched its 1998 report at the United Nations in New York, made the vital link between improving smallholder agricultural productivity and promoting household nutrition, especially maternal and infant nutrition in areas prone to chronic hunger.
This link between farming and nutrition underscores the powerful combined roles of women in food production and in managing household nutrition and family health.
Moreover, 70% of the extremely poor hungry people live in rural areas and 80% of them are to some extent involved in subsistence farming. Building local systems to link household access to food with stimulating sustainable local supply systems is the crucial key to cracking the hunger issue, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where the proportion of chronically hungry people is over 30%.
The Hunger Task Force also urged the Irish Government to play a strong role as a voice for the world’s hungry in galvanising international attention and action on addressing world hunger.
That report received cross-party support at the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs, has been broadly accepted by Government and is being actively implemented. Hunger and nutrition have become a key plank of Ireland’s development policy, so much so that Ministers Martin and Power “played a blinder” at the recent MDG Summit at the United Nations in New York.
Ireland’s stature on the world stage, in relation to hunger and nutrition, has become incredibly powerful.
Who would have thought, two years ago, that Ireland and the United States would co-host a major UN event focusing on nutrition for The first 1000 Days — from conception to Age 2. , co-chaired by Minister MicheálMartin and Secretary Clinton. Minister Martin got rousing applause when he announced that Ireland was “committing 20% of the Irish Aid programme to reducing hunger”.
The tide is turning. Ireland is playing a leading role in focusing attention on hunger and nutrition. The US has dramatically altered its policy towards development rooted “in concrete results that pull communities and countries from poverty to prosperity” (to quote from President Obama’s address to the Summit).
The World Bank is promising to increase substantially its support for agricultural development and African countries have undertaken to increase their agricultural spend to 10% of their national budgets.
The summit has produced a strong outcomes document. These commitments now need to be converted to sustained action over the next five years. As the secretary general said in his closing comments last month: “In the past, we have seen that when the spotlights are switched off, world attention quickly moves on to other issues. With only five years left, we cannot let that happen.”
Irish ministers deserve our ongoing support to keep the international spotlight on World Hunger. Let’s be “United Against Hunger” for the next five years.
* Denis Lucey is chairman of the Gorta Hunger Secretariat and UCC Emeritus Professor (former Head of the Department of Food Business and Development at UCC.)
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