Worthington on the Food Summit- Final Day
June 9th, 2008 at 10:19 am | posted by Sam.Worthington_President_CEO_of_ InterActionInterAction President and CEO Sam Worthington wrote this post on the final day of last week’s FAO emergency food crisis summit in Rome.
I leave the Summit with some stark facts.
It will cost the world $60 billion dollars more to purchase as much fertilizer as last year; growing our way out of the food crisis in parts of the developing world won’t happen easily.
100 million people have less food and may be hungrier than a year ago. And sadly, it’s a rural child who is most likely to starve.
Most affected families are now adopting coping mechanisms to deal with the crisis: eating one less meal each day; looking for food in the bush; getting help from extended family or neighbors. These are coping mechanism they would generally only use in a disaster, but are forced to use today in this slowly unfolding emergency.
Even as the conference was ending negotiations were taking place behind closed doors on consensus language for the conference’s outcome document. I learned that at one point there were hundreds of bracketed words and phrases – denoting that that particular nations disagreed with their inclusion in the document – and those words are now absent from the final declaration. Unfortunately for those who are currently going hungry, politics often overshadowed the important task at hand.
We shall see what they came up with, and more importantly, get a better sense of whether the political will exists to take meaningful actions to address this crisis. In the meantime, aid agencies will continue to fill the gap.
Sam Worthington is the President and CEO of InterAction, the largest coalition of U.S.-based international NGOs focused on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. More information about InterAction’s response to the food crisis can be found at: http://interaction.org/foodcrisis
