UN food agency calls for renewed global action to fight hunger

With an eye to the upcoming five-year review of progress since the 1996 World Food Summit, the United Nations today called for reinvigorated international action to fight hunger and chronic undernourishment.

"A stronger political commitment and time-bound action are needed to improve the livelihood of around 800 million people in developing countries, many of them children, who cannot live a full life for lack of access to adequate food," the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said in a set of policy documents published today as part of the preparations for the Summit review, which will take place in Rome this November.

Painting a rather bleak picture, one FAO report notes that since the 1996 Summit, there is no evidence of a rise in international or domestic resources for agricultural development. Instead, official development assistance for agriculture has fallen steadily. "At the same time, a number of the most food insecure countries, while failing to mobilize resources for reducing hunger, have managed to increase their military expenditure."

Both developing and developed countries seem to be unwilling, in spite of the commitments made five years ago, to set aside sufficient resources to eradicate hunger, according to report. Relatively modest investments, combined with simple technology changes, can raise small farmer productivity, improve food security and reduce poverty, FAO said. The agency also called for developed countries to open their markets, especially for the agricultural exports of developing countries.

The agency said the side-by-side existence of hunger and plenty in today's world called existing approaches into question. "The simultaneous persistence of widespread extreme food deprivation and plentiful food supplies in a world with excellent means of communications and transport can only suggest that there are fundamental flaws in the way in which nations are functioning and the relationships between them are governed and managed."

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said the five-year review should give new impetus to the effort to supply food to those in need. "We must raise both the political will and the financial resources to fight hunger," he said.