FAO Seeks to Help Hungry Workers

May 16, 2002

Increasing the productivity and incomes of agricultural workers who feed Asia and the Pacific yet are hungry themselves is a central goal of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Achieving this objective is vital for eliminating hunger from Asia and the Pacific, which has two-thirds of the world's about 800 million undernourished people, R.B. Singh, assistant director-general and FAO regional representative for Asia and the Pacific told a gathering of Asian civil society groups.

About 100 representatives of some 80 non-governmental and civil society organizations from 13 Asian countries working in the field of food security and rural poverty, met in Kathmandu on last week to formulate regional civil society's stand on food security issues for the June 10-13 World Food Summit: five years later at FAO headquarters in Rome.

Equitable access to resources - material, institutional and social - is vital for unleashing the tremendous productive potential of the rural poor and is a main objective of FAO's endeavours in the region in the coming years, Singh said in his closing remarks.

Taking note of the concerns expressed by the civil society groups, Singh said that the world food and agriculture agency is striving to ensure that liberalization of agricultural trade under the new world trade rules does not hurt the interests of developing Asian countries and particularly those of resource-poor cultivators. In this context, he called for globalization with a human face.

He also emphasized the importance of peace as a vital condition for food security, pointing out that armed conflicts in this mainly rural region usually take place in the countryside with disastrous effects for agriculture and food security.

Singh explained that small and marginal farmers make up the bulk of agricultural households in Asia and the Pacific, which is home to 75% of the world's farm families. Three-fourths of the region's undernourished people live in villages and depend on agriculture, fisheries and related rural industries for their livelihood.