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Millennium Development Goal 1 : ERADICATE EXTREME POVERTY AND HUNGER |
Food democracy: A policy that should place
the individual's well-being at the centre
by Mr. Pier Ferdinando Casini, IPU President
Barely a month before the recent Rome High-Level Conference on World Food Security, the IPU held its Assembly in South Africa. The overriding theme of the parliamentary meeting was Pushing back the frontiers of poverty, which is perhaps the single most acute handicap afflicting our world, and the prime reason why human aspirations so rarely find fulfilment. Poverty paralyses: when daily life is a struggle to survive, nothing else matters.
As the Assembly was deliberating this issue, food prices were skyrocketing and riots were taking place in countries in every corner of the globe. This latest crisis adds to the enormous challenges facing democracy in societies where a large proportion of people are fighting to survive on a daily basis. In such situations, public priorities are food, health and shelter; when a person is hungry, no amount of freedom of speech will meet his or her basic needs.
This recent food crisis therefore represents a huge challenge not only to people who have to contend with food shortages and may face starvation, but also to democracy itself. It is essential that democratic institutions, and foremost among them parliaments, address this issue to make sure that we pursue the right policies and that we have the right kind of laws in place. This is no mean challenge. The statistics alone are daunting. Projections estimate that food production needs to grow by a further 50 per cent in the next 20 years to meet demand. Achieving that will require a new agricultural revolution. Moreover, the statistics and the analyses which are presented to us point to some very uncomfortable truths, one of which would have it that it is the development model which we are pursuing which is undermining our ability to feed ourselves.
Indeed, one of the the main causes of higher prices comes from rising demand due to rapidly rising income growth, particularly in emerging economies. Not to mention the price of oil, and rising costs caused by speculation and climate change.
Moreover, we are resorting more and more to biofuels to meet our ever increasing demand for energy. Some experts estimate that as much as one third of the increase in food prices is due to the demand that biofuels place on grain. Our current development model is also behind much of the climate change, water scarcity, declining availability of arable land and reduced fish stocks experienced recently.
At the same time, the gap between rich and poor is widening and we may well reach a situation in which relative inequality can have absolute implications for the world's poor; a world where the burgeoning global middle class inadvertently takes food beyond the purchasing power of the world's poorest people. Those people, as we should all know, are in their overwhelming majority women and children.
I therefore welcome recent efforts by the international community to take stock of the current situation and to start putting together a collective response. We need a global policy on food that is clear in its objectives. It must be a policy that seeks to feed all of the earth's inhabitants as healthily as possible.
When designing this policy we would be well advised to think in terms of what many call “food democracy”. It provides a better conceptual framework than “food security” for designing future policy. Food democracy implies that the policy must be driven by the same values that underpin democracy: that is, respect for the dignity and fundamental rights of the individual, social justice and economic and social development. In other words: a policy that places the individual and his or her well-being at the centre.
Parliaments invited to commemorate
International Day of Democracy
The United Nations General Assembly established late last year a new International Day to celebrate Democracy, which will be commemorated for the first time on 15 September 2008. Highly symbolical, the date coincides with the adoption, in September 1997, of the IPU Universal Declaration on Democracy. Speakers of parliament are invited to undertake activities that could highlight the place of parliament in a democracy to give the widest possible visibility to this first commemoration.
This day would be an opportunity for parliaments to emphasize the importance of democracy, what it involves, the challenges it faces as well as the opportunities it offers, and the central responsibility that all parliaments have as the key institution of democracy. And also to examine and discuss how parliament performs its democratic functions.
Parliaments are invited to organize an event on democracy in one form or another on or as close as possible to 15 September. A panel event will be held at the House of Parliaments on the morning of 15 September on the concept of democracy, underscoring that while the existence of a parliament may not in itself guarantee democracy, there can be no democracy without a parliament.
IPU supports United Nations Millennium Development Goals
THE GOALS | |
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| Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger |
| Achieve universal primary education |
| Promote gender equality and empower women |
| Reduce child mortality |
| Improve maternal health |
| Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases |
| Ensure environmental sustainability |
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Develop a global partnership for development |
Several articles of this issue of The World of Parliaments focus on some of the eight United Nations Millennium Goals (MDGs). The MDGs, which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS by the target date of 2015, agreed by all the world's countries and leading development agencies, have harnessed unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world's poorest and the IPU supports this challenge.