Tre af FN-familiens tunge drenge understreger, at en stor del af Afrikas fremtid hviler på millioner af små fødevareproducenters skuldre, hvis kontinentet skal være fri for sult og underernæring i 2025 – og landbrugsudvikling giver pengene tifold igen.
YOKOHAMA, 1 June 2013: The three heads of the Rome-based United Nations agencies Saturday called for food security and nutrition (ernæring) to be placed at the centre of the international agenda for African development. The goal is hunger eradication by 2025.
Special attention should be given to supporting smallholder farmers (småbønder) to improve global food security and empowering rural women, addressing gender inequalities and enabling them to transform their own lives and the lives of their families and communities.
The Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, the President of the International Fund for Agricultural development (IFAD), Kanayo Nwanze, and the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Ertharin Cousin, all spoke at the Fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD V) in Yokohama.
The three agency heads said that the most effective key to reversing hunger and poverty in developing countries lay in responsible investment by governments and the private sector in sustainable agricultural and rural development.
They noted that in sub-Saharan Africa, GDP growth generated by agriculture had been shown to be eleven times more effective in reducing poverty than GDP growth in other sectors.
They stressed that it is time to invest in the critical agents of change: small producers and their organizations, family farmers, fishers, livestock keepers, forest users, rural workers, entrepreneurs and indigenous people.
The agency heads commended countries that had made strong efforts to reduce hunger within their boundaries and on the African continent in general, and indicated that the discussions at TICAD would help inform the high-level meeting to be held on 30 June and 1 July in Addis Ababa.
The meeting is co-organized by the African Union and FAO and supported by the Lula Institute. WFP, IFAD and other development partners will also participate in this event.
They agreed that hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty should remain at the core of the post-2015 agenda, following the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (i 2015), and expressed confidence that the world could overcome the twin scourges of poverty and hunger within a generation.
However, they issued a warning that this will not be achieved unless we address the underlying causes of gender inequality and lift the barriers to the empowerment of women – the main producers, processors and traders of food in Africa, despite the fact that 85 present of agricultural land is owned by men.
For more on the work of the UN Rome agencies on
www.fao.org
www.ifad.org
www.wfp.org
Kilde: FNs Fødevare- og Landbrugsorganisation (FAO).
