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To overhaul food systems, broad approaches should be backed: FAO chief
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Wednesday, 01 October, 2014, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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fiogf49gjkf0d Policymakers should support a broad array of approaches to overhauling global food systems, making them healthier and more sustainable, while acknowledging that they cannot rely on an input intensive model to increase production and that the solutions of the past have shown their limits.
This was stated by José Graziano da Silva, director general, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in his opening remarks to the 24th session of the Committee on Agriculture (COAG), a technical advisory body that helps guide and formulate FAO’s policy agenda.
Calling for a paradigm shift, he stated that the main challenges were to lower the use of agricultural inputs, especially water and chemicals, in order to put agriculture, forestry and fisheries on a more sustainable and productive long-term path.
“Options such as agro-ecology and climate-smart agriculture should be explored, and so should biotechnology and the use of genetically-modified organisms (GMO),” Graziano da Silva added.
He noted that food production needed to grow by 60 per cent by 2050 to meet the expected demand from an anticipated population of nine billion people.
“We need to explore these alternatives using an inclusive approach based on science and evidences, not on ideologies, as well as to respect local characteristics and context,” he said.
Graziano da Silva asked the COAG, which would conclude its biannual meeting on October 3, 2014, to consider the importance of family farming in all aspects of its agenda.
Members of COAG also heard Danilo Medina, president of the Dominican Republic, outline his country’s novel use of surprise visits to rural communities as a way to improve officials’ understanding of their needs.
Medina said his government was a strong supporter of the principle, ‘food is a universal right’ and believed that the only viable strategy to fight hunger is to revitalise the countryside and rural incomes.
The Dominican Republic achieved its Millennium Development Goal ahead of schedule by reducing its hungry population to below 15 per cent from more than 34 per cent in 1990.
The island was planning to institute a law promulgating the right to food, which had Graziano da Silva’s nod.
“Political commitment at the highest level is fundamental to advancing towards food security,” FAO’s director general added.
In his keynote speech, Medina said rural poverty in the Dominican Republic had declined by nine percentage points in the first 18 months of the current government, even faster than nationwide poverty.
This was the result of a host of policies, including almost doubling in two years the volume of agricultural loans, many of them offering improved terms of credit, grace periods, and crop insurance to smallholders.
Medina emphasised that social and economic policies should be complementary in developing nations, most of which need to invest more in the creation of human capital in rural areas.
He added that the budgetary costs of his country’s efforts had proven surprisingly modest.
“It is not a question of committing resources, but of taking decisions - even small amounts of money, well-targeted, can make an impact,” the president of the Dominican Republic said.
”Surprise visits to farming communities have played a major role in catalysing an agricultural boom,” added Medina, noting that he personally participated in the outreach project.
The visits offer an opportunity for officials to listen and better understand concrete local concerns, and also to encourage smallholders to establish cooperatives and other organisations to scale up their competence.
”The countryside in the Dominican Republic is undergoing a real revolution,” Medina said.
“Subsistence agriculture on small plots of land perpetuates the vicious cycle of poverty. The only way that our producers can be competitive is to join forces,” he added.
“We see that by working together toward a common objective, they are producing as never before,” Medina stated.
The COAG meets every two years. The central themes being discussed this week were water governance; livestock diseases (in particular the effort to replicate the successful eradication of Rinderpeste on the Peste des Petits Ruminants), soil management and food safety.
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