INTERNATIONAL AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH AND FOOD SECURITY

Policy Settings for Food Security

Meryl Williams

Dr Williams is Chair, ACIAR Board of Management and former Director General of the WordFish Center
Each day across the world 800 million people go hungry. These people are often termed ‘food General of insecure’-meaning that they are not sure how they will meet their food needs because they cannot produce enough to feed themselves, or they do not have enough money to buy food, or their food provides insufficient nourishment (perhaps because they are already sick). What policy settings can make a difference for food security? We now know that food security depends on three factors, and all are important to act on: sufficient supply of food, the means to afford that food, and sufficient nutritious food for a healthy life. To try to achieve concurrent success with all three factors, countries and governments must work together in a global system, and this is happening through the United Nations (UN). First, the 1996 World Food Summit adopted the target of halving the number of food-insecure people by 2015. Then, in 2000, the UN Millennium Summit took this and other related goals and put them into a comprehensive package called the Millennium Development Goals.

Millennium Development Goals

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

• The Goals recognise that poverty and hunger have many faces and come about because of many different causes-from natural disasters, to disease, lack of family support, lack of education and so on.
• Most countries are developing or already have national policies to help them meet the targets. Such policies need to cover many different sectors - from agriculture to health, education and water-to achieve food security.
• Most developing countries start their action by paying more attention to agriculture, forestry and fisheries. More attention to the rural sectors can mean better rural roads, investments in agricultural research, irrigation, investments in clean water and in education. Studies show that all these bring about big improvements in food security.
• Countries have found it 17 July, 2006uly, 2006f the agricultural sector improvements.
• A developing country’s own policies and political will are found to be very important for improving food security.
• Disasters such as wars and terrorism, diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS, cyclones and floods all wreak havoc on food security. International agricultural research plays a role in overcoming disasters-for example, in war ravaged Afghanistan and Iraq where the CGIAR Centres in partnership with national research institutes are helping restore farming by providing suitable crop seeds from their seed banks.
• Trade policies also have a role to play in food security because agricultural trade (especially imports and exports of food and fibre) normally dominates trade in food-insecure countries with few manufactured goods and services to trade.

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