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Failing
the rural poor - aid, agriculture and the MDGs
Action
Aid International
September
10 , 2008
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As global leaders gather in New York to review progress towards
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the world is in the grip
of a food crisis which threatens to derail progress towards all
of the goals.
The cost of
staple foods has risen by an average of 80% in two years. As a result
100 million more people have joined the ranks of the hungry, and
a further 750 million are newly at risk of chronic hunger. ActionAid
calculates that as many as 1.7 billion people, or a quarter of the
world's population, may now lack basic food security. Since
women and girls are overrepresented among poor and excluded people,
the food crisis is having a particularly harsh impact on them. According
to the FAO, even before the current crisis women made up 60% of
the chronically hungry.
But the current
situation is, in fact, a crisis within a crisis. Hunger was already
a fact of life for more than 850 million people worldwide before
the explosion in the cost of food.
At the World
Food Summit in 1996, the global community committed to halve the
numbers of hungry people by 2015. The MDGs, agreed in 2000, include
a commitment to halve the proportion of hungry people. Although
there has been some progress in reducing the proportion of hungry
people, both targets were critically off-track even before the food
price crisis. Ten years after the World Food Summit the number of
hungry people in the world has risen from 800 million to 850 million.
In this new context, both targets will almost certainly be missed
unless there is a major change from business as usual.
The
right to food
Everyone has the right to food. It is the most fundamental and enabling
human right of all. Without food we cannot live, function or thrive.
Hunger hinders
education and development and thwarts productivity. It prevents
societies from realizing their potential and it is responsible for
more deaths globally than AIDS, malaria and TB combined.
Hunger is the
violation of the right to food. It is the result of gross inequality:
- in ownership
and access to arable land and water resources;
- in access
to public goods such as infrastructure - irrigation, roads
and energy;
- in access
to markets, credit, information, training and extension facilities
and services;
- in access
to education, health and social protection;
- in access
to legal, political and economic decision-making processes, offices
and the powerful people who control them.
In all these
areas, women and girls are particularly discriminated against and
excluded, making them disproportionately represented among hungry
people. The historical foundations of hunger are rooted in how societies
are structured, and how local elites, allied with former colonial
powers and their modern-day equivalents, have shaped rural economies
for their own benefit.
This briefing
focuses on a sector that is critical in ending hunger - agriculture.
In particular, it focuses on the role of aid to agriculture in developing
countries. Aid is not the only instrument of inter-government policy
that impacts on agriculture and the ability of people to feed themselves
adequately - trade and private investment are also of central
importance.
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