BEYOND THE CRISIS

  • by Jose Graziano da Silva
  • Inter Press Service

If we wish to create a sustainable economic order for the 21st century, we will have to go beyond that which existed in the past. Because of this, we will have to base our actions on those tenets that have the broadest and clearest support and legitimacy in the eyes of society: human rights and the commitment to tear down the walls that prevent the equal access of all people, writes Jose Graziano da Silva, Regional Representative of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In this article, the author writes that all of this must be definitively incorporated into a development agenda and multipolar institutions -particularly the right to adequate food, a fundamental part of the right to life enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is because threats to this right are once again emerging that the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation is calling for a new World Food Summit for 2009. The importance of this right goes beyond economics to biology itself. Even if overcoming the current impasses leads to a delay of the process of global reconstruction, we still have to generate a consensus on a matter of urgency that simply cannot wait: eradicating hunger.

(*) Jose Graziano da Silva is Regional Representative of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service