IATP's Alexandra Spieldoch is blogging from Rome at the World Summit on Food Security.
At the summit today, there is a buzz of government delegates and media inside the halls of the Food and Agriculture Organization here in Rome. Unfortunately, the summit is a bit stale and out of sync at a time when so much more is needed. For example, governments adopted the final declaration on the morning of the first day of the summit, even as there are two more days of negotiations and roundtables to go before the summit officially ends. The declaration in and of itself isn’t bad. It isn’t groundbreaking either. In fact, it distinctly falls flat in terms of any new approaches being put forth.
In the declaration, governments support the Global Partnership for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition (GPAFS) without much clarity around what this kind of coordination actually means. They reference the sense of urgency to act and to coordinate actions that increase production and trade among other things, even as it is clear now that this approach has contributed to the failure of the food system and that different responses are needed. The declaration supports a stronger Committee on Food Security (CFS), a central part of the Global Partnership, and a coordinating structure. This is an important move in terms of increasing coordination and putting the emphasis on the important role of the UN, where it should be. Yet we also know there is the parallel track, which is the G20 push for a global trust fund to address hunger to be housed at the World Bank; this effort is moving very quickly outside of a UN process and is seemingly unaccountable to the broader commitments being made in Rome. Governments also commit to substantially increasing overseas development assistance (ODA) without giving targets or timeframes.
The declaration references the need to examine possible links between speculation and agricultural price volatility and the need to examine the role of reserves. This isn’t new language, but it is important. From IATP’s standpoint, it is right on track. It is a concrete measure that governments must get behind. In fact, some already are. In a press briefing yesterday, France and Brazil announced they will take concrete measures to curb price volatility and to regulate predatory investments in farmland (land grabs), expressing the importance of regional grain stocks. Farmer-owned, publicly-managed food stocks are a critical policy tool for improving the livelihoods of smallholder producers and to eradicating hunger and poverty.
In short, we have the tools to improve global food security. Now it is a question of political will. If the message from governments and the UN is that hunger is a collective tragedy and hungry people cannot wait, then leaders must invest in what is needed to change this horrible path that does not have to be.
