World Food Day 2003

Farmers hungry on World Food Day
By Jack Wilkinson, President of the IFAP

While everybody is celebrating World Food Day, on October 16th, the very ones who are producing food fear for their future. The world faces a paradox: the farmers’ work is to feed the world and yet many of them cannot even feed themselves and their families. While in many developed countries the quality and quantity of food is now taken for granted, in this 21st century full of plenty, 840 million people still suffer from hunger and most of them are farmers. How can we hope to eradicate hunger and assure food security without farmers?

Celebrating World Food Day both means underlining on the one hand the tremendous achievements of farmers who produce high quality food in an environmentally-friendly way while respecting animal welfare, and underlining on the other hand the tremendous challenges faced by farmers who struggle to survive. While the FAO calls for an “International Alliance Against Hunger”, worldwide farmers are calling for concrete actions to address this critical situation. It is time to include in the against hunger fight, a fight to improve the livelihoods of farmers.

World Food Day is the occasion to point out the contribution of the farmers to food security, and to show just how little farmers receive in return. Let’s bring the focus onto farmers and rural communities. Most of the 1.2 billion people who live in absolute poverty are farmers, often women farmers. Many do not have secure access to land, water, seeds and credit. They lack basic infrastructure for education, health, water management, marketing and transportation.

Even when farmers are fortunate enough to go beyond producing food only for their families and produce a surplus to sell on commercial markets, they are confronted by monopoly traders who often charge excessive prices for farm inputs and pay very low prices for farmers’ products. This day reminds us of such issues.

Do the consumers really know the farmer’s story behind the food they eat? Do they know that less than 20 per cent of the money that they spend on food goes to the farmer? Even for “fair trade” products, like “fair trade bananas”, three-quarters of the extra money that consumers pay goes into the pockets of food chain sector industries, not the farmers. Do consumers in industrialised countries know that when they pay $3.60 for a pound of coffee, only 24 cents go to the coffee farmer? Do they know that for every $1 they spend on bread or French fries, only 6 cents goes to the farmer? At the same time, in developing countries, families have to spend 80% of their incomes for food.

Concrete actions to address this critical situation means supporting national initiatives, through appropriate legislation or professional frameworks, to strengthen the position of the farmer in the food chain. If hunger and poverty are to be reduced, then the market power of the farmers needs to be strengthened relative to the other food chain partners. However, effective partnerships are partnerships among equals, and today too often farmers are unequal players.

In response to this, IFAP has set up a development cooperation initiative in which farmers’ organisations in industrialised countries help to strengthen the farmers’ organisations of their colleagues in developing countries. This is our contribution to the “International Alliance”. But farmers cannot do this alone. National governments and international institutions must pay far more attention to ensuring that food and agricultural markets function competitively, and are not controlled by a few large multinational companies.

As a farm leader, I am very concerned about the lack of progress in reducing world hunger. This is due to the neglect of agriculture. Worldwide farmers hope that World Food Day 2003 will go beyond the “International Alliance Against Hunger”, and raise awareness of the alarming situation of the farmers and their rural communities. Three-quarters of the poor live in rural areas and derive their livelihoods from agriculture or related activities. If world leaders are serious about reducing hunger by half by 2015, then they have to explicitly acknowledge that the fight against hunger includes a fight to keep the farmers on the land.

World Food Day is a time for citizens all the over the world to acknowledge the achievements and challenges farmers face everyday in producing food for the nearly 7 billion people who occupy this planet. Moreover, this day is the time for world leaders, both national and international, to refocus and reenergize the fight against hunger. Status quo is not good enough. We expect action. Farmers are ready to work to produce enough food for everyone. Are world leaders are ready to join us?