37th IFAP World Farmers’Congress

Seoul, Republic of Korea, 17 May 2006

 

Address by the President of IFAP

Mr. Jack Wilkinson

 

It is my pleasure to declare the 37th General Conference of IFAP open.  For this opening session, you will have approximately one hour of hopefully excellent speeches, and an outstanding cultural program from our hosts the NACF of Korea.

 

I would like to thank everyone for being here. Some of us have been here since Saturday for numerous committee sessions, but this is the big congress which really celebrates our 60 years of existence. There will be more about that later, as you can see on the agenda. For now, I would like to report back to you - as I think it is an appropriate thing for the President to do - what we have been up to over the last couple of years and what we plan to do over the ones ahead of us.

 

Some may wonder, particularly new members and some who are attending the congress for the first time, what is this all about. What do we really do, other than talk?  I would like to assure you that even though there is a lot of conversation and a lot of talk, which I think is important to share ideas from some 120 national farm organizations from nearly 90 countries now, it is important to get together to talk and share experiences and ideas.  That was one of the principal reasons of the founding fathers of IFAP - to better understand each others’ agriculture, understand the agricultural issues and share the possibility of good solutions that work for farmers.

 

We needed these 14 committee meetings that just took place at this congress to help make sure that we have been on the right path as an organisation and as a secretariat.  It is important that out of these various committees we have the types of recommendations that you think are key for us to be working on, and reaffirm some of the policy statements that we will adopt over the next couple of days that really give the guidance of what we will be saying around the world as we attend meetings on your behalf.

 

I believe that the importance of international organizations like ours, even though we are 60 years old, is growing. Many issues now are really decided, even though it is in a broad general way, at the international level. We have protocols on greenhouse gases, on biodiversity, and the list goes on and on.

 

An individual farmer in your country may ask the question, which my neighbours often do, what difference does that make to me? Well, it does make a difference and probably one of the ones that illustrates this the best in my mind was when the World Health Organisation decided that it was going to redo the dietary guidelines. It seems like a fairly innocuous sort of thing and why would anybody in the farming community get all that excited about it. But when we started to attend those meetings in Geneva, it became very clear that some views in WHO on what should be people’s eating habits really did not reflect our views as farmers. There were issues that would clearly affect the dairy industry quite dramatically, and that would affect the sugar industry quite dramatically.  So we contacted many of our member organizations to take on this issue. Some of you responded with experts in the dairy industry who understood what was at stake, as we did not have the specific expertise in our office.

 

We contacted member organisations in a number of countries to ask if you would meet with your Minister of Health and try to make sure that these issues of concern to farmers were discussed before they were adopted at the WHO. I’m not convinced that we did the job as well as we could in the future but it was an attempt for us to have more influence and be of  some value to every member, whether you are developed or developing. We are going to continue to do this more and more, and the more we do this the better we’ll get at it.

 

We now have standing at the OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health). This allows us to have an input into every draft paper as it relates to our issues. We can circulate these drafts to yourselves to see the impact on farmers of proposals on how we handle drugs, withdrawal time periods, how livestock are trucked, etc. - issues that really affect the daily lives of producers. We are continuing to do this more and more. It obviously will require us as an organization to change the way we allocate resources. To that end, Australia and some others  asked us to bring forward a strategic plan to this congress to really lay out some clear objectives of what we intend to do, so that we are not just wandering around following issues - even though we are really busy. There are a lot of issues to follow. In fact we need to lay out what we can do and what we can’t do, how we use our limited resources,  and how we can find additional resources for the programs that we need to implement more aggressively.

 

There are obvious limits to what national farm organizations can afford to pay to the IFAP when they have many issues at home to deal with. So we must be smart with our money and we must be effective. The strategic plan has been sent out a couple of times and it will be discussed during this congress to give us further guidance and then be adopted later.

 

We will be changing the IFAP as an organization.  We have grown significantly in numbers of members, and even though growth is a wonderful thing and reaffirms that people see value in your organization, growth in itself also has actual very practical problems for the Secretariat. How do you keep your members informed? How do you communicate more effectively with them? It is not just good enough to send everybody an e-mail and whoever responds that’s it. We must find out why some countries do not respond.  Is a particular topic area not an issue to them? How can we describe things in different ways to different organizations in different cultures so that they all see the need for us to work together and the need for us to be effective lobbying internationally? 

 

I know that over the last number of years, our office has had to concentrate a great deal on development issues. It is clear that in a world where farm families make up two-thirds of the population in many countries, with many of them having a very low standard of living, and where there has been a commitment of world leaders for the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty and hunger, obviously there are many issues and many meetings and many events where we have to represent you appropriately on the development side.

 

But also we must remember that we are not a development agency. To that end, when Gerard Doornbos, was President, we started the process to build a development agency - AgriCord. Many of you know that we have had wonderful success since 2003 with that agency working together and finding resources. So it is my goal that in the thinking around how we organize ourselves in the future, we will be able now set those development issues in the development agency. IFAP would be able to move back more to policy issues as it affects all farmers, knowing there will be resources to build capacity to make sure that we get the input from developing country members. I think that is where our strength lies, in policy. But there will be some in the room who will say, it is hard to get into policy, when your farmers are starving to death. And that is true. But we have to find ways of solving some of the problems for producers everywhere.

 

To that end when you look at the agenda, we have top speakers who can make a difference for farmers. The Executive Director of the UN Convention against Desertification has offered a new arrangement for us to work with them in the future. I hope that this will allow us to have a significant impact as farm organizations, and I hope that this will lead to a new way of working with international organisations.

 

The President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development will also speak at our congress. This is an important intervention for us since IFAD has clearly decided that they want to do joint partnerships with farm organizations, and in particular with IFAP.

 

Some of you will know that we have also got the Dutch Minister of Development Cooperation coming to our meeting. She clearly is making a substantial commitment to a new way of doing development cooperation by investing in building capacity of farmers’ organisations, through our development agency so that it can do the work it needs to do. Some of that work in my mind is not attending meetings. We have to look carefully at what are the needs of our producers and how we help them to organize more effectively in the market. There are many tools that are being used around the world. How do we use our cooperatives more effectively? How do we negotiate in open markets? How do we set up auction systems? All of these systems are working in various countries. Currently, we are working with some universities in Europe to do some analytical work on what currently exists, how different market instruments work, what are the regulatory and administrative tools they need and are they adaptable to other country situations, so that farmers can get more organized.

 

But it is not just about price, even though price is important. Probably one of the trends that worries me the most in my travels is the fact that as the multinationals -supermarkets and processors - move around the world they bring to a country a different agricultural structure and a different food industry. The local markets are disappearing. In fact two things are happening in many developing countries: people are quickly moving to urban areas, and urban areas are quickly being taken over by multinational food industries that operate differently. They want to make one telephone call and they want enough produce that meets traceability and food safety standards instantly or they have another number they are going to call.

 

Are farmers ready for that type of globalisation? In many countries the answer is “no”. Are there governments in those countries doing anything to get people ready and the answer often is “not nearly enough”. So we have got to do more than just talk, and to that end I think it is critical that we work with other people from other countries to help build systems that have worked. You will see food safety issues on the agenda as well.

 

In closing, I just want you to enjoy this time period here. After the opening ceremonies and after a bit of reflection of the past, which is important, we will be rolling up our sleeves to do the work to give us the guidance for the next two years. Many things are in transition right now, many things are happening, and that is exciting. Because when you have over a billion people living on less than a $1 a day, when you have 800 million people going to bed malnourished at night, something had better be happening at the International Federation of Agricultural Producers. We had better roll up our sleeves and go to work because there is a lot for every farmer and farm organization in the world to do. Things are not right the way they are right now. We must make changes. Let us get excited about it and let us make changes and drive them home to governments around the world. Thank you for coming. I look forward to the few days ahead of us.