Strategically Speaking: The World Food Summit, five years later and Responses to Franck Amalric
- PDF / 73,077 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 536.3 x 697.32 pts Page_size
- 21 Downloads / 168 Views
27/9/01
3:19 pm
Page 6
Development. Copyright © 2001 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200112) 44:4; 6–16; 020139.
Upfront
Strategically Speaking: The World Food Summit, five years later FRANCK AMALRIC
ABSTRACT Franck Amalric sets out some of the criteria for an international movement for food security among governments, financial institutions and civil society and assesses the WFS according to these criteria. He asks that we look seriously at whether the World Food Summit was merely a communication event with no real power, capacity, or even intent to actually bring about change, and take the opportunity five years later to reverse past failures. KEYWORDS civil society; FAO; financial institutions; food security; political will
In December 1996, more than 100 heads of states and governments came together in Rome to address one of the most unacceptable feature of our modern world: that in an age of plenty, some 800 million women, men, and children do not have access to sufficient food. The World Food Summit was one in a series of large UN conferences that, throughout the 1990s, aimed at raising international co-operation to set plans of action to address the more pressing global issues, including the rights of children, women’s empowerment, reproductive health, poverty, environmental sustainability, and, thus, food security. On the face of it, these were grand and ambitious initiatives. The mobilization of world leaders, year after year, in various parts of the world – Rio, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cairo, Rome, among others – was without precedent. Finally, after the end of the cold war, international co-operation could genuinely set as its main task to create the conditions for all people to live a dignified life. Excitement was in the air, during the preparations of the conferences and during the conferences themselves, the excitement of feeling that history was being created for the better of humankind. Since then, unfortunately, excitement and constructive energy have given way to disillusionment. Reviews of some of the conferences five years later,
02/3 Amalric (to/d)
27/9/01
3:19 pm
Page 7
Amalric: Strategically Speaking WTO
Global economy
World Bank -IMF
1
National policies 2
WFS 3
Country X
P o l i t i c s
Figure 1
Rio +5, Cairo +5, Beijing +5, Copenhagen +5, have already shown that little action followed on the commitments made, and that, by and large, implementation and follow-up are off target. The World Food Summit, five years later, will not break the trend. Six months in advance information is already out that little progress, if any, is to be reported in the collective fight against hunger (FAO, 2001a). Why? How can we explain to ourselves – concerned individuals from around the world – that our governments are unable to follow-up on commitments they solemnly made to work together to fulfil such a basic human right as the right to food? And we know that the issue is not a lack of food – we indeed live
Data Loading...
