Environment/poverty
UN junkets can't solve world hunger
Amid almost total indifference from major imperialist media and politicians and behind a cordon of 16,000 police protecting the politicians from 30,000 anti-globalisation demonstrators, the second World Food Summit of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation took place in Rome on June 13. Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi closed the meeting 2 hours early in order to watch the football.
This symbolic act possibly marks the beginning of the end for UN-sponsored summitry as a means of defusing the demands of the masses of the South for an end to hunger, environmental degradation, exploitation and oppression.
As one of the delegates to the Civil Society Forum for Food Sovereignty (CSF), an organisation of third world farmers, fisherpeople, forest dwellers and aid workers, put it: "We should have no more food summits".
Earlier the summit had rejected the FAO’s bureaucrats’ call for a $24bn-a-year investment programme to cut hunger by half by 2015, merely reiterating that aim (currently running 45 years behind schedule).
Instead, they forlornly called for imperialist countries to honour their commitment, from the 1992 Rio World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), to increase aid to 0.7% of GNP.
The summit declaration is otherwise full of pious words but no serious concrete measures are suggested to advance their aims. Instead of answering farmers’ demands for land reform, protection of biodiversity and ending the dependence on international markets and transnational corporations, the declaration, at the insistence of the US delegation, committed the FAO to "facilitate the responsible use of biotechnology in addressing development needs".
The CSF suggested that this was the key decision of the summit. It presages a major offensive by biotech companies to promote GM crops as the answer to world hunger at the upcoming "Rio Plus Ten" WSSD in Johannesburg in August and at a US-hosted ministerial-level International Conference on Agricultural Science and Technology early next year.
The CSF rejected the declaration, with the claim, not that it lacked political will, but that it had too much will to promote globalisation, trade liberalisation, GM and military domination that are the main causes of global hunger.
The aim of biotech and agribusiness is to increase their control over world food production. There has never before been so much food produced and production methods are now so intensive that land degradation threatens an even greater disaster than the 815m people officially classified as hungry.
Another major threat is global warming: possible sharp changes in local climate could make some strains of crop currently gown unviable and also increase problems from pests. Biotech companies promote GM to combat this (e.g. introducing genes for pest or drought resistance or salt tolerance).
A report in New Scientist of June 22 indicates that yield gains of using such technology are at best marginal, further emphasising that the issue is who controls production and the markets rather than some technical fix.
The débacle at the World Food Summit (and the likely one at the sustainable development summit in Johannesburg) may have a positive spin-off for the anti-globalisation movement. We could be at a point when Green and environmental organisations realise it is useless to put their efforts into presenting their positions at such summits.
It is reported that there are to be 45,000 delegates to the Civil Society Forum in Johannesburg, and there are complaints about delegates from Western NGOs lording it in an exclusive white suburb right next door to the township of Alexandria.
Hopefully, the large majority will have no illusions in the ability of imperialist-controlled talking-shops to rectify the problems of world food security and environmental degradation and will make sure in future that their campaigns for land reform and debt relief are addressed in the fields and in the streets.