Nations Ponder How to End Hunger at World Food Summit

June 11, 2002


	HSUS

By Susanne Abromaitis

On Monday, June 10, the first day of the "World Food Summit: five years later," the attending heads of state unanimously reaffirmed their commitment to halving the number of the world's hungry by 2015.

This week, officials from 182 nations are meeting in Rome, the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, to review the advances made since the 1996 World Food Summit and to consider specific measures to achieve the goal set out in that original summit: to cut the world's hungry by half. The current meetings have been convened largely due to the slow progress made since 1996. According the FAO's own estimates, the number of hungry has declined by only 6 million a year, far below the 22 million a year needed to reach the goal.

In approving a "final declaration"—essentially an expanded version of the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security—the nations urged the FAO to create "a set of voluntary guidelines to support Member States' efforts to achieve the progressive realization of the right to adequate food."

As part of the 2002 summit, non-governmental and civil society organizations from 92 countries are also gathering to take part in the NGO/CSO Forum for Food Sovereignty. Their hope is to draft a declaration and a plan of action that they will present to world leaders on the last day of the summit. Among their key strategies to ending world hunger is this: adopting "agro-ecological models of agriculture instead of industrial models."

That's where The Humane Society of the United States comes in. The HSUS is working to discourage the spread of factory farming methods to developing nations, a growth that is already taking root.

HSUS's Role in the Summit

Linda Elswick, HSUS's director of sustainable agriculture, has been instrumental in pressing for the adoption of humane, sustainable agriculture into the summit agenda. The goal is to adopt "best practices" that take into account many elements: not only how to best alleviate poverty and hunger and reverse environmental degradation, but also how to best address the economic, social and humane aspects of agriculture.

Elswick is working closely with the FAO staff assigned to implement Agenda 21, which is the blueprint adopted by world leaders after the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This unique initiative involves nine major groups in society: NGOs, farmers, scientists, local authorities, women, indigenous people, youth workers/trade unions, and business/industry. The FAO is the "task manager" for many of the land-related chapters of Agenda 21, including chapter 14: Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD).

Facts about Hunger

Hunger is a global emergency: As many as 2 billion people live in poverty and approximately 1 billion live in "utter poverty" with daily hunger and deprivation. The causes of the hunger epidemic are complex, and it cannot be solved simply by large scale animal production, as some have proposed. The implications of introducing factory farming are fairly straightforward: It concentrates intensive animal production to a very small area, and such an operation requires high inputs of energy, causes pollution, and destroys rural communities.

Nonetheless, foreign-owned factory farms continue to expand into developing countries at an alarming rate. With their own domestic markets saturated, U.S. factory farms seek to expand abroad by exporting products and introducing the industrial model of animal agriculture to countries such as China, where the state of environmental health is already precarious. Factory farming imports all of the devastating environmental, animal and worker abuses into low-income nations at their expense.

The Solution

The HSUS advocates a humane, sustainable agriculture as part of the solution to end global starvation. Factory farming is incongruous with the World Food Summit's stated intent of supporting sustainable development in nations; therefore, loopholes that permit intensive livestock operations to proliferate in developing countries must be identified and stopped.

The United States, as an affluent nation, must focus not only on promoting sustainable agriculture abroad, but also examine its own intensive and unsustainable methods of production at home. Fostering local food systems, whether in Nairobi or Iowa, is the most cost-effective, environmentally sustainable and humane approach to farming—and to working toward the goal of eliminating hunger worldwide.

E-MAIL THIS PAGE

PRINTER FRIENDLY