24 More summits and circuses
by Patrick Mulvany (ITDG)
At the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) World Food Summit: Five Years Later (WFS+5), delegates acknowledged that there has indeed been no progress in reducing hunger since the World Food Summit six years ago, except perhaps in China. Cuban Foreign Minister, Felipe Pérez Roque echoed his leader Fidel Castro's words at the last summit when he pointed out: “That there are, today, still 815m hungry people in the world is truly a crime. That the proposals we made nearly six years ago are now even further from being achieved is shameful.”
Worse, in Rome a month earlier, 20 leaders of the world's most powerful countries met at the NATO-Russia summit and agreed effectively to sustain the now $800 billion global armaments industry, with no reference to the need to balance this with increased overseas development assistance. All but one of the leaders at that meeting stayed away from the World Food Summit. Nevertheless, the government saw it fit to stage a military operation of 16,000 police, carabinieri and soldiers put in place to contain the politicians and exclude the people. The 30,000-strong March for Food Sovereignty organised by Italian social movements was kept at a safe distance. Some intended participants could not even enter the country, because of increased visa problems. FAO became a military zone. And this emphasised the sense of oppression in the Summit.
The US left the Summit happy: they had achieved acceptance of the term “biotechnology” in the final declaration, with no reference to biosafety or the precautionary principle; had deleted any reference to an international legally-binding Code of Conduct on the Right to Food; and had watered down the call to ratify the new International Seed Treaty to something for countries “to consider.” The final Declaration “The International Alliance against Hunger” restates the same old recipe now spiked with biotechnology. It does not propose any new legally-binding measures, nor does it commit the rich to paying more to help the poor.
Civil society, including farmers' organisations, rejected this Declaration
and in their Forum developed a Food Sovereignty Action Agenda focused around:
Trade - getting the WTO out of agriculture; Genetic Resources - rejection of
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and Patents on Life and qualified support
for the International Seed Treaty; Agroecology - developing a new approach to
agriculture through locally-controlled, small-scale agroecological production;
and developing a legally-binding Right to Food.
Genetic resources were high profile at the official Summit because of the pressure
from the US government to gain acceptance of GMOs and life patents and partly
because the International Seed Treaty was being promoted by FAO. It ended up
with 47 new signatures (total now 57) and 7 ratifications.
Genetic resources were also prominent at the Civil Society Forum and side meetings. This time, the constituency was widened to include pastoralists and fisherfolk, who were concerned with the ongoing privatisation of resources, contamination from GMOs and impacts of the global trade agendas on local production systems. These were summarised in a background paper that built on the conclusions of CSOs at the sixth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in the Hague at which preparations were concluded for this Summit. These recommendations included a rejection of the use of genetic engineering technologies for plants, livestock and fish; a moratorium on their release into the environment and a ban on their release in Centres of Origin and Diversity of the world's food security crops; a ban on Terminator technologies and other genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs); a call to ban patents on life; and insistence that proposals to develop a “Global Conservation Trust” should include full participation of farmers' organisations and be under the rules and policies of the International Seed Treaty.
But the week gave no succour to the hungry. As a seasoned observer noted we should have no more Summits. The 1974 World Food Conference agreed to abolish hunger in 10 years. The 1996 World Food Summit committed to halving the number of malnourished people in 20 years. What would the next agree to?
For more information on the official declaration: www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/004/Y6948E.htm;
on the Action Agenda: www.ukabc.org/accessgenres.pdf
Reference for this article: GRAIN, 2002, Sprouting up - 24 More summits and circuses , Seedling, July 2002, GRAIN Publications
Website link: www.grain.org/seedling/seed-02-07-6-en.cfm
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