NGOs SLAM FOOD SUMMIT DECLARATION
New Straits Times
Friday, 14 June 2002

wfs-saro.jpg - 775.78 kb

(This article has been uploaded for reference purposes only, and not for distribution or reproduction.)

ROME, June 13. — Dozens of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) today rejected the final declaration of the UN World Food Summit in Rome, saying it was "more of the same failed medicine" which would not end hunger.

The 183 member-states of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reaffirmed a commitment made at the first World Food Summit in 1996 to halve the number of the world's hungry by 2015.

Delivering a withering assessment of the summit declaration, Sarojeni Rengam of Malaysia said in a statement read out to the final session that it merely "compounds the error of more of the same failed medicine with destructive prescriptions that will make the situation even worse".

The summit recognised the urgent need to reinforce efforts if its target of "half-by-2015" is to be reached, and acknowledged that the goal would not be attained at the present slow rate of decline in global hunger.

She said the 1996 plan, on which the current one is based, had failed "because it supports policies that lead to hunger, policies that support economic liberalisation for the South and cultural homogeneity, which are backed by military force if the first wave of prescriptive actions fail".

Governments and international institutions had presided over globalisation and liberalisation since 1996, she said, "intensifying the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition".

"These have forced markets open to dumping of agricultural products, privatisation of basic social and economic support institutions, the privatisation and commodification of communal and public land, water, fishing grounds and forests." She said there would be no progress toward the goal of eliminating hunger without a reversal of such policies, "but the current declaration offers no hope of such a reversal".

Instead it emphasised trade liberalisation "the greatest force undermining livelihoods around the world", and diluted the concept of human right to food, and failed to support strengthening of production by the poor themselves, said Sarojeni, of the Asia-Pacific group Pesticide Action Network.

The environmental group Greenpeace assailed the summit for being incompetent in addressing the issues of hunger.

In a statement issued at the close of the four-day meeting, Greenpeace said it was "especially regrettable that the summit gave in to US-led pressure and agreed to drop two key concepts of the right to food" and allowing precautions regarding biotechnology to be absent from the final declaration. - AFP