PRESS CONFERENCE BY SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON RIGHT TO FOOD

 

Despite high-level political pledges to feed the world, global hunger was rising rapidly and the first and foremost Millennium Development Goal –- to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 -- would never be achieved, Jean Ziegler, Special Rapporteur on the right to food, said this afternoon, during a Headquarters news conference.

The right to food was a basic human right and the world could produce enough of it to feed twice the global population, he said.  But food security remained a broken promise for millions, especially in rural Africa and Asia.  Last year, 852 million people were severely undernourished, up 11 million from 2004.  An estimated 320,000 were at risk for starvation in war-torn Darfur, and 12 per cent of the population, in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, suffered from severe hunger.  Worldwide, a total of 6 million children, under the age of five, died every year, from malnutrition and related diseases.

The debilitating impact of industrialized nations agricultural subsidies on developing countries and the lack of access to water and fertile lands, for millions of people in poor nations, were largely to blame, he said. The problem was particularly acute in Africa, where drought and locusts had destroyed one million hectares of farmable land and had left more than 25 million people “ecological refugees” in such countries as Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.

Governments willingness to fight hunger “by programmes, by agrarian reform, by revenue building is the only relevant weapon against this daily horrible, silent massacre,” he said.

Brazil’s successful “Zero Hunger” and “Bolsa Familia” programmes that had erased hunger, among that country’s 44 million people, were good examples, he said.  He lauded Guatemala’s first food security law aimed at preventing widespread malnutrition -- which had claimed the lives of 92,000 children, under the age of 10, last year, and said the airline ticket tax, recently created in France and elsewhere, to finance the fight against global HIV/AIDS and hunger was also a step in the right direction.

But, greater investment was needed in rural and small-scale agriculture, and Member States must guarantee food aid for all people living in crisis spots, regardless of whether their circumstances were applicable to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.

Mr. Ziegler briefed reporters on the main points of his interim report to the General Assembly on the right to food (document A/61/306), which he presented, Wednesday, to the Assembly’s Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural).

He told reporters that the Governments of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Sudan had denied his requests to investigate alleged violations of the right to food.   Lebanon’s Government had approved his request to assess the destruction of its civilian agricultural infrastructure, caused by the Israel-Lebanon conflict over the summer, but Israel’s Government had denied a similar request.   Israel’s Government, under international law, was obligated to pay damages to Lebanon for the agricultural devastation and to hand over, to the United Nations Mine Action Committee, maps of where it had planted land mines in Lebanon.

He also dismissed claims that his report was partial to Lebanon and the Hizbollah Party, stressing that his mandate was to address food crises and potential situations of food insecurity and that included meeting with Hizbollah officials, such as Lebanon’s Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Hydraulic and Electric Resources.

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For information media • not an official record