FAO meeting urges anti-poverty effort focusing on rights, equality and social protection

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) opened a one-week meeting here Saturday with a call for more rights, equality and social protection in the fight against poverty and hunger.

Joining representatives from more than 190 countries, Italian President Sergio Mattarella said that the right to food should be a core component of the basic right to life, and that true peace will never be achieved unless poverty and malnutrition are vanquished.

Issues such as climate change, natural resource limits and food and energy insecurity have consequences that cross borders and will require policy makers to adopt a rights-based approach at key summits on development finance, greenhouse gas emissions and new United Nations goals later this year, he added.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet stressed the need to foster efficient and inclusive food systems while urging governments to push back against rising calls for protectionism in international commodity markets and to broaden their anti-hunger programs to tackle new nutritional problems such as obesity.

Emphasizing the importance of gender equality when recalling Latin America's success in reducing hunger over the past decade, Bachelet said women "hold the keys to food security."

Chairing the opening session of the FAO conference, Le Mamea Ropati, Samoa's minister of agriculture, noted that FAO's work in providing technical advice and development assistance has helped many of the poorest people living in the world's smaller countries.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil, delivered the biennial Frank McDougall lecture, which was named after an Australian economist who helped found FAO.

He discussed the lessons learned from the ground-breaking Zero Hunger program he implemented in 2003 after being elected, which led to an obvious improvement of general welfare in Brazil, where fewer than 5 percent are hungry today, down from 20 percent when he took office.

He also stressed the need for political will to prioritize and guarantee steady resources in national budgets to combine food, health and education schemes with support for small-scale family farmers, rigorous civil registrars to ensure efficiency and transparency, policies that raise wages while "treating the poor not as statistical data but as humans, men, women and children." Endi