Soroptimists Attend Food Agriculture Organization Conference in Rome

Summary From the UN meeting in Rome about Food Security- NOVEMBER 2009

The VIP’s were all at the UN Summit on Food Security in Rome: The Pope, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Muammar Gadafi, Mugabe and many other heads of state and government.

They came to present their views on the fact that over one billion human being presently do not have sufficient food to meet their daily basic nutritional needs.

They unanimously adopted a declaration “pledging renewed commitment to eradicate hunger at the earliest date.”

In his address to the summit Ban Ki-moon called the current food crisis “a wake-up call for tomorrow”, and he and many other speakers underlined that “ there can be no food security without climate security.”

The FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf stressed that “In some developed countries, two to four percent of the population are able to produce enough food to feed the entire nation, while in the developing countries 60-80 percent of the population are not able to meet food needs in their country.”

He added: “The planet can feed itself, provided that the decisions made are honoured and the required resources are effectively mobilised.”

500 NGO’s from developing countries were invited by the Italian State to share their views in an alternative forum and Union President Asha Abdulrahman from Kenyan was representing SI at this forum. She could confirm that the food situation in Kenya is critical, as the small farmers - mostly women – those years see their harvest drop dramatically because of draught and poverty.

We hope that the food security will have a high priority on the agenda for the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December and I repeat Ban Ki-moon’s words: “there can be no food security without climate security”.

For Soroptimist international we only can encourage our members to focus on the women’s situation – mainly women farmers in Africa. It cannot be repeated too often:

The women make up the majority of the world’s poor.

Let us give them a hand!

SI representatives to the Summit:

Else Larsen, Asha Abdulrahman and Hanne Jensbo