Global IssuesDEVELOPMENT: Free Hungry Mouths of Red Tape
Developing countries must tone down the booming voice bureaucrats have in policies and target corruption if commitments to defeat hunger are to be turned into action, leaders and experts at a United Nations meeting said Wednesday.
The Group of Eight leading industrial nations pledged to devote 20 billion dollars to agricultural aid over three years last July while the international community agreed on the need to reverse the long-running decline in investment in the sector at November's World Food Security Summit in Rome.
While many developing nations and non-governmental organisations were disappointed rich countries did not stump up more money, others players say these commitments can translate into significant progress in bringing the number of hungry people down from 1.02 billion with the right approach.
A big part of that means making sure agricultural programmes are tailored to the needs of small-holder farmers, participants agreed at a high-level panel at the annual Governing Council of the U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
'In agriculture the principle stakeholder, the farmer, must be involved in policy formulation,' Ajay Vashee, president of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP), told IPS.
'They need to be able to demand the type of policies that would better enable them to remain viable in agriculture. All along you have some bureaucrats driving policy thinking that's probably what they want. Or you might have a donor or an NGO coming in and saying this is probably what they want. But no one bothers or has the ability to find a farmer who can say what they need.'
Campaigning by IFAD and its sister Rome-based food agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), has helped forge an international consensus on the importance of small-holder farmers for food security.
Small-holders are frequently exposed to hunger as the rural poor make up three-quarters of all undernourished people, IFAD says.
But the world will also need its 500 million small-holders, who already provide for around two billion people, to reach their full productive potential to achieve a 70 percent increase in food output estimated to be required by a global population likely to reach 9.1 billion by 2050.
'When rural populations are given the opportunity to determine their own destiny, they take it,' IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze told reporters before the panel meeting on turning the summit pledges into reality. 'We need to help them build strong community associations so they have a voice.'
Vashee said cooperatives are important to give farmers this collective voice with the added bonus that they also provide the opportunity for them to organise themselves and reach markets together that they would be unable to get to alone.
'The challenge is to get farmers to articulate their needs,' he said. 'Because there are vast numbers of farmers involved, it's better to organise farmers into groups that will allow them a platform or a forum where they can internally discuss (their needs) and put out a concerted position to say to policy-makers that 'this is what we want'.
'What it means is that we have to spend some resources to get them organised and that could lead to them building up into economically viable units as cooperatives as well.'
Policies must take account of farmers' needs in terms of the tools, know-how and seeds required to increase yields and cope with the effects of climate change, and rural infrastructure requirements such as small roads that enable them to take their crops to market, development experts say.
Countries such as Tanzania are trying reform their government and administrative set-ups to make them more receptive to these demands.
'We have started a process of decentralisation to take power from the centre to the communities through the local governments they make up themselves through electoral processes,' Tanzania Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda told IPS
'Secondly we have introduced a mechanism to make sure poor farmers have a say over some of these critical issues that affect their lives. We cannot put anything into the budget unless it originates from the people themselves. That budget process has empowered these people to be sure that what they want is what goes into the budget.
'Now they are coming up with suggestions for the (political) machinery.'
Pinda, whose government launched its 'Kilimo Kwanza' (Agriculture First) programme last year, also stressed that developing countries should not expect the wealthier nations to solve their hunger problems for them.
He said they must assume their responsibilities by making priorities of nutrition, agriculture and the war on graft, so that resources do not get diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials, in order to repeat the food security success stories of countries such as Brazil and Vietnam.
'If you really want to assist your poor people, corruption should be one of the areas you focus on,' he said.
'Combating corruption goes hand in hand with development. If you have a corrupt government, corrupt leaders, they won't do anything for their people, they'll think only about themselves.'
Members of the high-level panel conceded there was still some confusion about how much of the 20 billion dollars the G8 promised last year was new money, and about monitoring of whether the pledges were actually being followed through.
NGOs are wary about these promises after past failures to deliver.
Indeed, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report said on Wednesday that there would be a 21 billion dollar deficit between the aid promised by most of the world's wealthiest countries for this year at a G8 summit in 2005 and actual donations.
But Nwanze said the cash pledged at last year's L'Aquila G8 summit was starting to materialise, citing the example of his own agency's budget increasing by 67 percent to 1.2 billion dollars for the 2010-2012 period with some countries doubling or even tripling their contributions.
'We do actually have more money,' IFAD assistant president Kevin Cleaver told IPS.
'I know that the press has become fascinated with the fact that there is not as much as has been promised. But there's definitely more money available than in 2008 and the question is how we use this money efficiently and effectively to address food security problems.
'Let's get off the business of begging for more money. It's unlimited, the need for money. Let's use the money that we have, which are billions - it's disputed, but we definitely have billions - efficiently to address the problem.'
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service