TIGblogs TIG | TIGblogs GROUP TIGBLOGS LOGIN SIGNUP
Vicente Garcia-Delgado - My Blog


ECOSOC Civil Society Forum on the Global Food Crisis
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic



ECOSOC Civil Society Forum on the Global Food Crisis
Presentation by Vicente García-Delgado, CIVICUS’ Main Representative at the UN


I very much appreciate the opportunity to share with you a few reflections on the Global Food Crisis and its implications for global peace and security.

To John Holmes, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, the recent statement by food envoy Jean Ziegler to the effect that the current hunger crisis amounts to a “silent mass murder” is unnecessarily alarmist and “a little over the top”; but to those mothers and fathers who can no longer feed their children, let alone themselves, Mr Ziegler’s message may not sound so far-off. If you were watching your neighbours die around you because of hunger in a world awash with plenty, what would you call that situation?

These unfortunate people, who are being denied their most basic human right, the right to life, are not alone. Citizens of good will around the globe share the same sense of extreme urgency. Many of them will prefer to call a spade a spade, alarmist or not. FAO, UNICEF and other humanitarian agencies, Faith-based organizations, and the NGO community at large may be sympathetic to such “alarmist” warnings as well. According to recent estimates, 800 million people are now at risk of starvation; 100 million have joined the ranks of the extremely poor in just the last few months, and development in poor countries has been set back by 7 years. Thousands of children, the elderly and infirm will die of starvation and malnutrition during the run of this Forum. If alarm bells do not go off in these circumstances, something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Is it all that surprising then that riots are sprouting everywhere, placing weak governments at risk, and that social upheavals are affecting the security of nations?

I will not list here the many examples of violence registered on account of the hunger crisis. The inflow of reports by the civil society and even the mainstream media is overwhelming. Riots have already taken place in some 40 countries, some of them deadly. Some of these countries are of high geopolitical significance. A silent, and not so silent, “rolling tsunami” of social unrest is underway as we speak. Hungry people are desperate people capable of taking desperate actions. This tsunami is rapidly enveloping the global South, and it won’t take much longer before it knocks at the door of the global North. Even within the rich countries, increasingly large portions of the population are having real problems bringing food the table and paying for other basic necessities.

Many governments are increasingly nervous. They are starting to sense troubling signs of potential conflicts over scarce food and water resources both internally and with their neighbours.

Northern governments are taking notice: the hunger crisis has rapidly risen to the top of the international agenda. In April last year, the UK called a UN Security Council meeting to discuss the security implications of climate change. The UN, the EU, the G8, other intergovernmental bodies and agencies, including the FAO, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and others are scrambling to deal with this new crisis and find solutions before it is too late. And they do indeed seem alarmed, any attempts at soothing their disquiet notwithstanding.

Paraphrasing UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, climate change has the potential to generate wars and represents one of the biggest threats to Humanity.

Now the hunger crisis, a human rights violation of planetary proportions, has suddenly thrown the governments of the world against the ropes, having raised the ugly head of an impending peace and security crisis.

Before the global hunger crisis had reached current proportions, the implications of climate change on peace and security were discussed in late December at a conference organised by the Institute for Environmental Security, entitled “From Bali to Poznan – New Issues, New Challenges.” During the conference segment on the security implications of climate change, the speakers noted that current approaches toward the links between security and climate change have remained by-and-large beholden to a “national security” mentality by “sovereign states,” and wondered how the international community, collectively, may shape their involvement in the broader global competition between the haves and the have-nots, increase stability and decrease stress factors. They lamented the fact that there are currently no collaborative efforts to rectify this situation, and pointed out the need for security cooperation and the political will necessary to apply the resources to achieve it.

Thus, new instruments and mechanisms for collaborative action must be collectively pursued with the celerity the situation, now so dramatically aggravated by the hunger crisis, requires. As one of the presenters put it, Even though climate change may pose “hard security” threats, the policy response answer cannot be centered around “hard security instruments” alone.

This is the most important point of my message here today: the peace and security challenges that the huger crisis and climate change present must be understood as global challenges calling for global solutions that address adequately the concerns of all nations and all peoples. Governments must not fall prey to the temptation to seek unilateral solutions based on defensive or militaristic non-solutions. It would be extremely dangerous to look at the current crisis strictly from a national perspective. A knee-jerk resort to a “fortress America” or a “fortress Europe” type mentality would only exacerbate the risks of social and political chaos and will not work.

What is most needed, then, is a broad agenda for cooperative responses to the security challenges of climate change; a global agenda focused on ways to minimise the risks of internal, regional and international conflicts, including immediate steps by developed countries to mitigate global green-house gas emissions to sustainable levels; assisting developing countries in their efforts to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change; identifying security threats at local-to-global levels; reinforcing disaster prevention capacity, and exercising reconstruction efforts to prevent future vulnerabilities.

* * *

Feeding the hungry is obviously the most immediate challenge right now, but achieving the full implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a close second. There has been progress in some areas, such as a decrease in extreme poverty (thanks in large part to emerging economies in China, India and Brazil), external debt cancellation and increases in child education; but in other areas, progress has been minimal, while entire regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa are falling further behind. The general consensus is that the MDGs can be achieved by the target date of 2015 if developed countries would once and for all own-up to their part of the deal, ie, MDG Goal # 8, with the urgency and determination that the situation requires. The resources are there, and there’s simply no excuse to fail.

Implementing the MDGs is not enough either. The MDGs need to be substantially exceeded after 2015 in order to sustain the necessary level of progress which would allow for a broader level of development in poor countries, the only sure way to avoid a relapse into the current conditions.

Beyond that, starting immediately, development both in the rich North and the poor South must be sustainable. The current unregulated economic system and the out-of-control market globalization on which it is based must be transformed in order to substantially reduce the divisions between rich and poor both among nations as within nations, and to stop the further ravaging of our eco-systems and our biosphere.

Climate change is not a fortuitous act, but the result of 250 years of industrialization in the global North which first ignored, and then dismissed the ecological costs inherent to industrial production and consumption based on fossil fuels. Most of the global South has up to now contributed little, if anything, to climate change; their populations have not by-and-large benefited from market globalization, and they lack the resources and are least prepared to adapt to climate impacts.

And yet, poor communities and nations are already bearing the brunt of climate change. Rich countries have the resources to implement costly engineering projects, such as sea walls, to adapt to current and future climate impacts while millions in poor countries are left to swim or drown on their own. Looking the other way at this stage would amount to moral turpitude and would reflect an extremely dangerous lack of political foresight. Rich countries have an ethical, and indeed a legal obligation to assist poor countries adapt to climate change under Article 4 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Furthermore, climate change mitigation and adaptation must be implemented in a coherent manner, integrating the various strategies in national development plans. There can be no progress in climate change mitigation without progress in sustainable development, including the eradication of wasteful, energy-intensive patterns of production and consumption in the global North (and now China and India!), a substantial increase in the quantity and quality of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to reach 0.7% GNI (first promised more than 30 years ago!) and additional assistance on climate change adaptation for developing countries, including financial assistance, clean technology transfers, support for sustainable agriculture, and investments in infrastructure to avoid future vulnerabilities.

Fair trade, including the successful completion of the WTO’s Doha (Development) Round to help the poor, including through, among other things, the immediate dismantling of agricultural subsidies and other distorting trade barriers, and promoting sustainable agriculture, is another essential element of sustainable development, as is the cancellation of unsustainable debt, odious or not, of developing and middle-income countries. External debt is deemed unsustainable if it compromises the achievement of the MDGs and the further sustainable development of developing and middle-income countries.

Finally, the process of ODA, debt cancellation and fair trade must be carried out in a transparent, democratic, participatory and accountable manner, with the full and meaningful participation of civil society.

Beyond that, our institutions of global governance must move from strictly intergovernmental organizations toward more supra-national type institutions, starting right here at the UN. CIVICUS would welcome the start of discussions at the General Assembly on the creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly, as has been called over time by various civil society coalitions, most recently by the World Federation of UN Associations, the Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly and others.

The slow response so far on climate change, the neglect in developing sustainable agriculture, the rush to biofuels, the high cost of oil, a weak US dollar, commodities futures speculation, increased food demand in emerging economies, changes in diet in China and India… these and other factors have all combined to produce a “perfect storm” ahead of all calculations.

Civil Society has been calling for action for decades now, and there is certainly the temptation to cry out “We told you so!” Years of foot-dragging, unkempt promises, endless negotiations, a slow response to climate change, and the refusal to harness market globalization, these are the some of the principal reasons which have brought us to the sorry predicament we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The point is that unregulated Market forces should never have been allowed to dictate social policy; now market globalization has finally shown its failings in the full light of day, and the risks of mass starvation, climate change, and global political instability are straining the moral power and legitimacy of liberal democracies. Are we going to wait until it is too late? How much can Democracy stand?

* * *
CIVICUS’ outgoing Secretary-General, Kumi Naidoo has repeatedly called for civil society to be heard. There are several key opportunities coming up at which CIVICUS hopes and expects civil society to be heard on these issues. The Global Call to Action against Poverty will be working with partners to encourage a worldwide response.
Coming up first is the special meeting of the FAO from 3-5 June in Rome at which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be joined by several world leaders including French premier Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva . In conjunction with this meeting, people all over the world are expected to mobilise, sign petitions, take e-actions, talk to the press and call for immediate and long-term solutions to the food crisis. They will make sure that people living with the reality of the food crisis are given a voice in Rome (visit www.whiteband.org for details).
Just over a month later comes the second big opportunity, the G8 Summit in Japan. Not only will the food crisis still be top of the agenda along with climate change at the meeting in Hokkaido, but civil society plans to be heard when they present a global petition (www.whiteband.org/Action/take-action/actionnow).
And then the logical place to take this growing movement forward will be in the run-up to the September High Level Meeting called by the UN Secretary General at the UN on 25 September. An MDG Call to Action that has already got the support of over 30 countries across the world will help in keeping our eyes firmly on the goal. The 43 million people who Stood Up for the MDGs (www.standagainstpoverty.org) on 17 October last year and the hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty will expect nothing less.
* * *
The world is between a rock and a hard place, and the current economic crisis in the US and other countries is making our global challenges even more difficult to tackle.

Yet, all is not lost, except of course for those already succumbing to hunger and malnutrition. If we gather the much needed political will and act calmly, without resorting to defensive or militaristic ways, but with the urgency and determination our own survival requires; if we approach the current dangers as opportunities for a more just, equitable and compassionate world, together we can still do it.

Thank you.
Vicente García-Delgado, Esq
CIVICUS at the UN
CIVICUSUN@aol.com
www.CIVICUS.org
16 May 2008