Poverty eradication critical in improving access to food, UN envoy says

Effective national and international policies, anchored in an action plan adopted in 2001 in Brussels, could help meet the challenge of eradicating the hunger and poverty faced by more than 600 million people in the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), a United Nations envoy has said.

Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, UN High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States, noted that the basic objective of the Brussels Programme of Action is to achieve substantial progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015 and promoting sustainable development.

“Poverty eradication is critical in improving access to food,” he said in a statement to the executive board of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) Wednesday in Rome. “Food and nutritional security must be part of a larger framework of sustainable rural development and of poverty eradication.”

The High Representative welcomed WFP’s extensive efforts in creating emergency and development programmes worldwide, and noted the agency’s recent work in the Horn of Africa and southern Africa, where most countries are LDCs. “Food aid for development purposes assists national governments and local communities to realize their development objectives by helping the hungry and the poor to create assets and skills that benefit them and their communities,” he said.