World Food Day 2011
This Sunday, October 16, 150 nations around the world mark World Food Day as the global population rushes towards 7 billion by the end of the month. On Monday, a ceremony to mark the day will held at the headquarters of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
World Food Day is an annual event that marks the 1945 launch of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In a statement, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, “This month the world’s population will top seven billion people. The world has the knowledge and the resources to end hunger we have the tools to ensure that the poorest are buffered from the impact of rising prices. Let us use them – now – to conquer hunger.
The purpose of World Food Day is to:
- encourage attention to agricultural food production and to stimulate national, bilateral, multilateral and non-governmental efforts to this end;
- encourage economic and technical cooperation among developing countries;
- encourage the participation of rural people, particularly women and the least privileged categories, in decisions and activities influencing their living conditions;
- heighten public awareness of the problem of hunger in the world;
- promote the transfer of technologies to the developing world; and
- strengthen international and national solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty and draw attention to achievements in food and agricultural development.
Among the topics being discussed at conferences and symposiums is the volatility of food prices, which some say is the work of speculators in agricultural commodities. According to the Associated Press, between 2005 and 2008, the world’s staple food prices soared to their highest levels in 30 years and food riots broke out in more than 20 countries. But then the prices dropped again before the global recession began, then soared again in 2010 into 2011.
In an open letter, 461 economists from more than 40 countries wrote, “Excessive financial speculation is contributing to increasing volatility and record food prices, exacerbating global hunger and poverty.”
The World Food Bank noted that this recent increased pushed nearly 70 million people into extreme poverty.
Recently, at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, in a speech, Howard Buffett, President of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation, stressed the need to train farmers in drought and famine plagued countries. “There are over 500 million small-scale farmers in Africa who don’t know how to plant properly, they cannot access them, oftentimes they cannot afford them, they may not even know what they need. You can’t just distribute seeds and walk away and expect things to work. It’s just not that simple,” Buffett said.
Buffett continued, “It’s amazing that we continue to hear technology is the solution and that’s it’s the closest thing to a silver bullet. It’s a very important contributor, but if viewed as the single solution we’re never going to succeed.”
On this World Food Day, we can all take a look at the world of plenty that we live in, and consider ways to help our less fortunate brethren. Even in these modern times, the old Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” is appropriate.
