Foie gras, fine words, and failure—just another UN summit

Abstract

This week's UN World Food Summit has been an abject failure. Paradoxically, perhaps such an event was necessary to expose our globalised society's inability and unwillingness to ensure that its poorest members have access to the most basic of needs for human survival. Jonas Salk famously noted that: “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” By anyone's definition we are shaping up as ancestors of whom our descendants will be rightly ashamed. At the first World Food Summit in November, 1996, the heads or deputy heads of state of more than 100 countries signed a pledge to halve the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015. Governments made seven commitments—these included the eradication of poverty; the pursuit of political, social, and economic stability; and the development of sustainable food policies. At the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations in 2000, this World Food Summit target was incorporated into existing international development goals. Five and a half years later, the world's nations were invited to meet in Rome this week to discuss the progress made in achieving the laudable but not overambitious 1996 targets. After a lunch of foie gras, lobster, and fillet of goose with olives, delegates were reminded that no progress has been made in accelerating the reduction of the number of malnourished people in the world. To reach the Summit goal, the rate of decrease in the number of malnourished people would have to reach 22 million per year. Currently, the decrease is only an average of 6 million each year. An annual global decrease of 6 million during a time of population growth is certainly a positive result. However, this annual reduction was being accomplished even before the 1996 Summit. In The State of Food Insecurity in the World, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization compared individual countries' progress during 1990–92 and 1997–99. The countries were divided into two groups—those which reduced the number of malnourished people and those where the number had risen. Notably, China reduced its number of malnourished people by 76 million—66% of the total reduction of 116 million by all countries that had achieved a decrease in malnourishment. This week's Summit was originally scheduled for the end of last year, then postponed as a result of the terrorist attacks in the USA on Sept 11. During the intervening months, food security in southern Africa has become perilous. Reports released at the Summit on individual countries' situations concluded that nearly 13 million people in southern Africa face starvation. According to the report on Zambia, which has suffered its severest drought in 20 years, “People are turning to desperate measures including eating potentially poisonous wild foods, stealing crops, and prostitution to get enough for their families to eat.” In southern Africa crop failure, political mismanagement and corruption, and the destruction of social structucal mismanagement and corruption, and the destruction of social structures necessary for food production by HIV/AIDS, have all led to a situation that, without urgent food aid, threatens to deteriorate into famine. A leading factor in the development of this situation, however, has been protectionism in global agricultural trade. Developed nations' protection of their own agricultural sectors and cynical use of export subsidies to “dump” cheap surpluses in poorer countries, thereby destabilising local economies, has had a crippling effect on food access in developing countries. Given the fundamental need to reconfigure international trade agreements that are contributing to millions of people dying from starvation in a world where food abounds, it is all the more scandalous that the Rome Summit this week boasted only two heads of state from developed nations—Italy and Spain. We urgently need strong and passionate advocacy at the highest levels to bring some sanity to this appalling situation. Such advocacy resulted in pushing the notion of public health forward at the last round of World Trade Organization talks in Doha, with regard to drug patenting. This week's failed World Food Summit underscores the compelling need for pressure to push the very basics of public health higher up the agenda of the rest of the current world trade negotiations.