Leaders lack ‘political will’ for food security in Africa - new FAO boss
The new Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO, Jose Graziano da Silva has said ‘lack of political will’ was the most serious impediment to achieving food security in Africa.
Responding to a question from WADR during his maiden press teleconference at the FAO headquarters in Rome this week, the new FAO boss emphasized that the total elimination of hunger and undernourishment from the world will be his top priority.
Graziano da Silva, who took over from Senegalese Jacques Diouf, added that based on his experience with The Hunger Zero Program in Brazil, funding agricultural research and making it accessible to all would be key in achieving food security in Africa.
He said there was no time to lose and assured that FAO would begin by scaling up its support to a number of low-income, food deficit countries, especially those facing prolonged crises.
For the past four decades in Africa there have been persistent food crises, famine and food insecurity, with a region such as the Horn of Africa being the hardest hit. Currently there's famine, which started in 2011 and it has killed thousands of children, according to the UN.
Pundits have attributed the food insecurity and high illiteracy in many regions of Africa to structural adjustment programs imposed on countries in the post-independence era in the 1970s and 1980s by Breton Wood institutions, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Leaders were advised to reduce government spending, eliminate government subsidies for food and other items of popular consumption and privatize state- owned companies. African leaders were also urged to reduce barriers to trade as well as foreign investment and ownership.
Strategic sectors such as education and agriculture were left to the private sector which never met the challenge but instead plunged these embryonic economies into grounds for coups and social uprisings.
The reason was that the private sector focused agricultural activities on export crops rather than food crops, which generated wealth to a minority who often had strong connections with corrupt and authoritarian governments.
These economic policies proposed by the IMF, intended for economic growth, contributed to increasing the external debt burden on African countries.
Experts have also attributed the persisting food insecurity hitting Africa to climate change and efforts are being made in this regard by development partners to support mitigation and adaptation programmes for majority of the African population mostly confined in rural areas.
"Ending hunger requires the commitment of everyone," said Graziano da Silva, adding that he wanted to work "in the most transparent and democratic way" with member countries, UN agencies, the private sector, civil society and other stakeholders.
FAO, the new Director-General said, was determined to restore hope, an hunger eradication was the first of five strategic priorities the current administration intends to pursue.
The others are: moving towards more sustainable systems of food production and consumption; achieving greater fairness in the global management of food; completing FAO's reform and decentralization; and expanding South-South cooperation and other partnerships.
"We need to rebuild trust between the Secretariat and Member States to move forward, and I plan to do so by promoting a transparent and constructive relationship with Member States and FAO Governing Bodies", he said.
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