World Food Day 2009

As we mark World Food Day, we remain stuck in a food crisis. In East Africa, more than 23 million people are facing severe hunger. In the Americas, small farmers are struggling with growing seasons that have shrunk with climate change.

One in every six people living in the world`s poorest countries cannot access enough food and so go hungry every day.

Our leaders have another chance to put that right.

Next month at the UN World Food Summit in Rome, they will talk about ending world hunger. How are they doing? Not very well. The Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger by 2015 will be missed without more action - and yet a new pledge will be tabled to eradicate it totally by 2025.

If world leaders have any hope of reaching that goal, they must concentrate on helping poor farmers who have been left to fend for themselves on the front-line of hunger, poverty and climate change.

Three out of every four poor people depend on agriculture, meaning that is where global poverty must be tackled. In addition, small-scale farmers hold the key to increasing global food production in a sustainable way that could cope with climate change. The script is pretty straightforward.

All countries must invest more in small-scale agriculture, particularly to women who play a vital role in food security, yet have less access to land and services and tend to lack a political voice.

Rich countries must increase their agricultural aid to at least $20 billion a year; it hovers now around four per cent of overseas development assistance, just under $6 billion.

This year`s G8 summit pledged $20 billion over three years to poor farmers and consumers. This sounds generous but it equates to just $6 per hungry person per year.

However, the problem of hunger and poverty in a climate-changing world will not be solved simply by throwing more money at fertilizer, higher-yielding seeds and big irrigation schemes.

Agriculture needs to be rebuilt along entirely different lines and poor farmers and countries made central to that change. Countries must invest in farmer-driven extension schemes and social safety nets to help the poorest people buy food locally from small-scale farmers and traders.

Meanwhile, climate change is already causing massive shifts in seasonal growing patterns, especially in the tropics where most poor people live and farm. Poor farmers must not be left bearing the costs of these changes, which is why climate finance is such a deal-breaker at December`s climate change talks in Copenhagen.

Along with more investment, we need better checks on `boom-and-bust` speculation in food and fuel markets.

Finally, we need a new global partnership that can capture the power of the G8, guarantee the participation of poor country governments and civil society, develop global policies and coordinate the mish-mash of powerful influences on global agriculture that are now held by various UN agencies, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and others.

The UN Secretary-General should take leadership and develop a global plan of action for all, with the UN Committee on World Food Security playing a key policy-making role.

This summit will run for two-and-a-half days, during which time 60,000 people will have died from hunger-related causes, 70 per cent of them children.

That alone should be enough to focus leaders` attention on doing the right things.