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Liaison Newsletter > LIAISON-Canada Electronic Newsletter #2

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Quebec City hosts Global Assembly on Food Security

Fifty years ago in Quebec City, Lester B. Pearson closed the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's founding conference by calling upon "the people" to make the FAO a success. Fifty years after that challenge, from October 8-10, 1995, over 200 representatives of peoples' organizations met in Quebec City to renew their commitment to the FAO goal of ensuring everyone enough to eat.

Organized by an international coalition of over 20 NGOs, including UNA-Canada, the Global Assembly on Food Security concluded with a 16-point list of Principles and Recommendations for action by governments, the FAO, and NGOs. Some of the key points:

  • sustainable food security should be recognized as a basic human right, enshrined in both national and international law;
  • ensuring sustainable food security for their citizens should be a "supreme obligation" of all governments, transcending the demands of trade, markets, structural adjustment or national sovereignty;
  • food production should strengthen local self-reliance, instead of making communities dependent on international markets;
  • technology transfer should complement, not replace, locally developed technology and knowledge;
  • recognition should be given to the role of local and indigenous communities in nurturing biodiversity;
  • the participation of civil society, particularly women, in the decision-making process should be increased within the institutions responsible for sustainable food security;
  • FAO should work with NGOs to organize a major NGO forum, to be held before the World Food Summit in November 1996;
  • At the World Food Summit, a new Forum Romanum should be convened, which would meet biennially and bring together representatives from governments, the UN system, and all levels of civil society to discuss the international food and agriculture agenda.

Speaking at a press conference at the close of the Assembly, Eugenie Aw, regional coordinator of the UN Development Programme's Africa 2000 network, argued that local solutions to the problems of food security already exist. The real challenge, she said, is to bring these ideas up through the system to the regional, national, and international levels. "The solutions are there," she said. "The only thing that is lacking is the political will."

The recommendations of the Assembly were also fed into the FAO Symposium, which began in Quebec City as the Global Assembly wrapped up. In his presentation to the Symposium, Bruce Moore, Executive Director of Partners in Rural Development, presented the assembled decision-makers with a number of questions directly related to political will. "Are we moving from summits to programmes that provide the poor in the South and the North with access to productive assets and sustainable livelihoods?" he asked. "Have we internalized the fact that hunger is not a production issue but one of access and power over productive resources? Are we serious about sustainable agriculture? Do we care enough to put production for local needs in front of trade, markets, structural adjustment and even national sovereignty?"