Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 40 • 18th November 2009

World Food Summit Falls Short of Expectations

Discuss this articleShare your views with other visitors, and read what they have to say

The World Summit on Food Security in Rome brought together 60 heads of state and scores of representatives from intergovernmental organisations to address the needs of the nearly 1 billion people around the world who suffer from undernourishment. The summit aimed to revitalise the United Nations Committee on Food Security and confront the global challenges of feeding the world’s hungry, but the official declaration that emerged from the meeting was widely criticised as unsubstantial.

The meeting, which lasted from 16 to 18 November, was hosted by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which is based in Rome.

At the close of the three-day summit, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, who had kicked off the summit with a fast to demonstrate solidarity with the hungry, voiced regret that the officials had failed to agree to “targets or deadlines that would permit better monitoring and implementation.”

Early drafts of the summit declaration aimed to eliminate hunger completely by 2025, an acknowledgement of the challenges facing Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halve hunger by 2015. But the final summit declaration, issued shortly after the meeting began on Monday, simply reinforced commitments to the MDG on food security.

The question of how to revitalise the UN Committee on Food Security (CFS) took centre stage. The summit declaration made the CFS a ‘central component’ of a ‘Global Partnership for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition’ to coordinate international governance on food security. However, questions about funding, monitoring and implementation remain unresolved.

Olivier De Schutter the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, noted that past approaches solve hunger had failed due to the “absence of accountability and follow-up on commitments made summit after summit.”

Representatives of NGOs present in Rome for the meeting voiced disappointment, pointing out that rich country heads of state had not attended the summit, and that the outcome had left many questions hanging. “The summit didn’t give the CFS money, made no commitments, or ability to monitor,” Matt Grainger of the NGO Oxfam told Bridges. “The summit sanctioned the CFS to address global governance on hunger but didn’t give it any of the tools.”

Agricultural trade

Trade was low on the agenda at the summit and only featured as a component of one of the round table discussions. The summit declaration addressed the issue in two paragraphs and called for a ‘timely, ambitious, comprehensive and balanced conclusion’ to the WTO’s Doha Round of trade talks. The declaration also commits signatories to refrain from taking measures that have “adverse impacts on global, regional and national food security” and that are “inconsistent with WTO rules.”

But Oxfam’s Grainger challenged the principle of that clause, noting that even if a trade measure is WTO-consistent, it could still pose a threat another country’s food security.

Other NGOs pointed out that the summit statement fails to address the role that developed country subsidies and market access barriers play in shaping global agricultural production and trade. Alexandra Spieldoch of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy noted that the “WTO seemed very secondary” at the Summit and that the officials had shown a “misunderstanding the current failure of the food system.”

“This is a moment to rethink the model” of agricultural production, Spieldoch said, adding that three years’ worth of calls for urgent action have not yet yielded sufficient results.

Food and climate change

Addressing the summit, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cautioned participants that “food security and climate change are deeply interconnected” and that there could be “no food security without climate security.”

The theme, woven through his speech, called attention to the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen and the need to work with intergovernmental organisations, the private sector, and civil society to help realise the right to food.
Moon’s words were also echoed in the WSFS declaration, as well as in a declaration that emerged from a civil society summit that was held in parallel to the FAO-sponsored gathering. The NGOs called for an “ecological model of food provision,” while the FAO summit participants agreed that “climate change poses additional severe risks to food security and the agriculture sector.”

More information

The FAO summit declaration is available here http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/Summit/Docs/Final_Declaration/WSFS09_Declaration.pdf

The NGO summit declaration is available here http://peoplesforum2009.foodsovereignty.org/final_declarations

ICTSD reporting.