IFPRI News Release: International Conference Sets Priorities for Achieving Access to Food for All by 2020

PRESS RELEASE

September 6, 2001

International Conference Sets Priorities for Achieving Access to Food for All by 2020

BONN – The conference on Sustainable Food Security for All by 2020 concluded this afternoon with the setting of priorities for action. This conference was the largest-ever gathering of representatives of governments, non-governmental organizations, academia, and the media (outside of the UN framework) to discuss how to assure universal access to food. More than 800 people from Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America participated.

"We have spent three days discussing how to assure that everyone on the planet has enough food for a health life. During this time, about 45,000 children died from hunger. That this should be tolerated in our day and age is an outrage," said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and winner of the 2001 World Food Prize.

During the final afternoon session, participants provided feedback to an IFPRI vision statement that provides a possible roadmap for eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some key points in the vision statement:

  • Because the large majority of the world's poor live in rural areas, agriculture must play a key role, not only in reducing hunger, but also in reducing poverty.
  • Governments need to invest in public agricultural research, especially focused on how to achieve productivity gains for small-scale farmers.
  • Globalization can be both beneficial and harmful to poor people. The European Union, the United States and Japan, need to provide market access for developing country farmers.

Participants identified three main priorities, in order of importance:

  • Investing in human needs: basic health care, primary education, and clean water.
  • Promoting good governance: ensuring the rule of law, creating transparency, and eliminating corruption.
  • Improving markets, infrastructure and institutions: assuring that agricultural markets are not biased against small farmers, less favored areas, or poor consumers.

IFPRI's conference came on the heels of the "World Food Summit: five years later" in November. This summit follows up on the 1996 World Food Summit, in which world leaders committed themselves to cutting malnutrition in half by 2015.

"The results of the 2020 conference have inspired us and will enrich our work in the future. We will present these results at the World Food Summit," said Uschi Eid, Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development for Germany.

IFPRI research released at the conference indicates that the world is not on track for meeting either the goal of World Food Summit or the 2020 conference.

"The sad fact is, given the current reality, food security for all will not be achieved by 2020. Such a breakthrough would require a whole new level of commitment, focusing on priority policy actions and resources," said Rajul Pandya-Lorch, head of IFPRI's 2020 Vision Initiative and lead organizer of the conference.

"We know what needs to be done. We now have to accelerate the action," remarked Volker Hausman, secretary general of Deutsche Welthungerhilfe.

IFPRI is working with high-level policy makers from several countries and international institutions to create a "Bonn Food Policy Circle" to accelerate progress towards reaching the goals of the conference.

"I'm sure that we will all take home new ideas and new political energy for our daily effort to achieve food security. It is important that the conference won't be considered as an end, but rather as a beginning of new efforts," Eid commented.

Pinstrup-Andersen concluded, "many people have asked me if this conference was successful. It depends on the attention that governments, journalists, and civil society organizations give to the issues we raised here in Bonn. It depends on the willingness of all us to stop accepting what is clearly unacceptable. It depends on whether we will begin behaving with the sense of urgency that the daily tragedy of hunger demands of us. It must be done, and IFPRI and its partners will do everything in our power to assure that it is done."

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IFPRI, the leading international think tank on food policy, seeks sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. IFPRI is one of 16 Future Harvest centers and receives its principal funding from 58 governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Please visit our website at www.ifpri.org. IFPRI identifies and analyzes policies for sustainably meeting the food needs of the developing world. IFPRI is one of 15 Future Harvest centers and receives its principal funding from 58 governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
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