Today is World Human Rights Day. It's time to make famine a human rights issue, writes Michael O'Brien
"Unless those causes of famine which are rooted in the West are tackled here, the response of NGOs will remain continuously hollow and we will soon be faced with another famine."
This mid-eighties critique of the 1984-'85 Ethiopian famine by Charles McCarthy, a Trócaire project officer for Africa at the time, was challenging and prophetic.
Today, Ethiopia again faces famine. Readers are right in supposing that food appeals have appeared consistently throughout 2002. On December 16th, the United Nations World Food Programme launches its Africa Hunger Alert in an effort to address the immediate food needs of the estimated 40 million people in Africa at risk of starvation. These include 14½ million in southern Africa, a similar number in the Horn of Africa and the remainder in Sudan, the Western Sahel and west Africa.
Commentators are agreed that the causes are complex and vary from country to country. Extreme weather conditions, conflict and HIV/AIDS are all contributory factors in terms of heightening people's vulnerability to famine.
Famine is synonymous with poverty and the reality at the start of the 21st century is that more people are poorer and more vulnerable in parts of Africa today than a decade ago.
In Zambia, 86 per cent of the population are living on less than a $1 a day, the international poverty line, compared with 69 per cent only five years previously. Increasing poverty levels are a shared experience for other famine-stricken countries, including Mozambique and Malawi.
Responding to a briefing by the executive director of the World Food Programme to the United Nations Security Council on December 3rd, Ireland's representative stated that "the central issue at stake was political commitment, particularly by developed countries".
The World Food Programme's Africa budget stands at $1.4 billion, of which $700 million has been raised. Significant deficits for 2002 include $51 million for southern Africa and $11.4 million for their Ethiopian programme. While the international community is challenged to provide additional humanitarian funding it is also committed to halving the number of people experiencing hunger by 2015.
Achieving this goal involves addressing the structural causes of poverty; ensuring that local, national, regional and international governance structures have poverty eradication and sustainable development as core objectives.
The majority of the world's poor live in rural areas, with 2½ billion people dependent on agriculture as their main source of income. The welfare of almost 40 per cent of the world's population is dependent upon international agricultural policies being framed on the basis of assessing their impact on poverty and food security.
However, the World Trade Organisation's Agreement on Agriculture, the principal international agreement on agricultural trade, does not have the World Food Summit's commitment to halving world hunger by 2015 as a primary goal. To date, the Agreement on Agriculture has promoted a model of agriculture which has jeopardised food security in developing countries.
While promoting market liberalisation in such countries as Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi, donor countries are allowed follow a distinctly protectionist path, providing subsidies to their agricultural sectors.
By legitimising the use of subsidies in developed countries, while narrowing the options available to developing countries, the latter's ability to compete in an increasingly globalised market has been compromised. As a result, both food security and the potential for agriculture as an engine of growth in developing countries has been undermined.
In tandem with the Agreement on Agriculture, there are all too many examples of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies exacerbating poverty and heightening the risk of food insecurity among the most vulnerable in developing countries.
Undoubtedly, agricultural reform is needed where inefficient policies are supported by poor governance systems. The private sector and market have a role to play in generating agricultural growth; but as the current African food crises underline, the market alone cannot ensure food security.
Countries such as Malawi should be allowed to maintain national emergency food reserves, to provide subsidised inputs to small farmers and extension services to rural communities.
Where possible, governments, with the full participation of their parliaments, small farmers' representatives and civil society groups are best placed to design national agricultural policies within the context of wider national development and poverty reduction strategies.
The EU-Africa summit in April 2003 and the fifth ministerial meeting of the WTO next September will test the political commitment of Ireland and the international community to agree policies which protect and promote agricultural development in the world's poorest countries.
In Lisbon next April, the EU should reform its Common Agricultural Policy, immediately eliminating agricultural export subsidies and dumping. I
In the run-up to the Cancun ministerial meeting in September, the EU can underline its commitment to poverty reduction by supporting the developing countries request for a development clause in the Agreement on Agriculture, which would allow the policy options of developing countries to meet their development objectives to protect vulnerable farmers and promote food security.
Michael O'Brien is policy analyst with Trócaire