World Federation Meets Here in 2004

June 3, 2002

Members of the 50-plus-nation International Federation of Agricultural Producers voted Friday to hold the organization's biannual World Farmers Congress in the United States in 2004. The National Farmers Union (NFU), IFAP's only U.S. member, will host the conference.

IFAP's 35th World Farmers Congress took place last week just outside Cairo, Egypt, with 500 participating delegates from among the group's 86 member-organizations. IFAP is an umbrella group of national farm organizations established in 1946.

In other action at last week's session, IFAP members elected NFU President Dave Frederickson to the organization's 18-member executive committee and debated four major policy topics: food safety and quality; industrial concentration in the agri-food chain; agriculture and the current World Trade Organization (WTO) round; and rural poverty, sustainable agriculture and food security.

On the issue of industrial concentration, a topic important to U.S. farmers, IFAP adopted a policy statement recognizing that farmers have little choice about from whom they purchase input supplies or to whom they sell their products. The paper urges national governments and world bodies to enforce regulatory policies aimed at creating and restoring competition in the agricultural marketplace.

IFAP also called on policy-makers to adopt a moratorium on mergers and consolidations in the agricultural processing and retailing sector until the effects of such transactions globally can be analyzed.

On food safety, IFAP delegates supported the notion of food labeling such as the "country-of-origin" provision recently passed in the U. S. farm law.