Recognizing Food
Security In Rome:

A Report From The
World Food Summit

The World Food Summit (WFS) in Rome from November 13-17, held under extraordinarily tight security at the U.N.'s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) saw heads of state, presidents, prime ministers and ministers of agriculture agreeing with many valuable points in the Rome Declaration on Food Security and the Summit Plan of Action. There are valuable points in this 35-plus page statement: gender equality, equitable access to food, the need for agrarian reforms, condemnation of food as a political weapon, a call to shift from military spending toward inceased food security, and much more.

Within the framework of trade liberalization, and the free (meaning "deregulated") market, the aim of the WFS is to reduce by half the number of chronically hungry people from the present 800 million to 400 million by the year 2015. Yet there is a contradiction: the global market responds to money and economic power, and most of these 800 million do not have either. The deregulated market, while undoubtedly creating vast wealth, creates it unequally so that wealth is flowing upwards, away from hungry people at the bottom. Poor farmers in this system will continue to be driven off the land, the food insecurity of poor people will increase, despite all the speeches and good intentions. Indeed, references in earlier drafts to increasing domestic production and protecting farming communities disappeared in the final statement. The role of transnational corporations in the global food system became invisible.

There were some striking moments in the WFS when this contradiction almost appeared, but it was left to Cuba's controversial President Fidel Castro to point out the contradictions. "What kind of cosmetic solutions are we going to provide so that in 20 years from now there would be 400 million instead of 800 million starving people?" he asked. He condemned the framework itself: it is capitalism, neoliberalism and the laws of a savage market, external debt, underdevelopment and unequal terms of trade that are killing many people in the world, he said. His speech was received by delegates with a kind of glee, as if they were delighted to hear some truths they dared not say themselves. Yet Castro's words did not change anything: like the court jester who speaks the truth to power, but then power resumes its normal course.

In the Felliniesque venue of the Ostiense Air Terminal another "Summit" was taking place, a gathering of 1200 NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) - farmers, anti-hunger advocates and food security activists from around the world, strategizing on real ways to end world hunger and achieve "Food For All." The atmosphere could not have been more different from the official WFS: energetic, turbulent, controversial, impassioned. The diagnosis was completely different. Instead of "market-driven food security," the NGOs advocated "farmer and community-driven food security."

They were positively eager to identify the contradictions in our global food system and how we could build food security from the bottom up, using fair trade rather than free trade. An important political strategy for NGOs was developed by Pat Mooney of Rural Advancement Fund International to use FAO's regional conferences in the next three years to document how trade liberalization is creating food insecurity, with a view to rewriting the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules in the year 2000.

There was so little real dialogue between the somnolent WFS and the chaotic but imaginative NGO Forum. FAO Director General Jacques Diouf and other dignitaries addressed us sincerely and eloquently at the NGO Forum, but I felt that they were resigned to a Summit which would have little teeth, "all nouns and no verbs" - all declarations and no actions to implement them - as Pat Mooney put it. The U.N. and the FAO have no money. Only multinational corporations have money. Perhaps that is why they are seen, officially, as the key to food security when NGOs see them as the cause of food insecurity.

The U.S. delegation to the WFS under Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman was pleasant to NGOs and open to dialogue until the conflicts in the global food system were raised, whereupon their commitment to trade liberalization assumed a positively religious fervor. The U.S. reservations on the right to food were shameful. I found the official Summit interesting as a rorschach test of how the world community is paralyzed at this point in history and unable to take the steps needed to solve its problems, in this case world hunger. I was inspired by the energy and courage of the NGOs gathered in Rome. But it was also clear that a real solution will only appear when the two assemblies become one and the contradictions are recognized. On the closing day of the WFS, the excellent statement of the NGO Forum, "Profit For Few Or Food For All: Food Sovereignty and Security to Eliminate the Globalization of Hunger," was read to the official delegates and received with the greatest applause of the entire meeting. This might be a sign that real dialogue can begin some day.

Peter Mann represented WHY, along with WHY board member John J.Poelker, Jr., at the World Food Summit.