INTERNATIONAL FUND FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT (IFAD) - FONDS INTERNATIONAL DE DEVELOPPEMENT AGRICOLE - FONDO INTERNACIONAL DE DESARROLLO AGRICOLA

Mr. Fawzi H. Al-Sultan, President, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

I have much pleasure in addressing this World Food Summit, the first world food conference since 1974.

At that early Conference a pledge was proclaimed that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years, and sadly we are still far from achieving this noble objective. Nonetheless, in these two decades, we have learned a great deal about overcoming hunger and food insecurity. The key, as the Declaration of this Summit so eloquently underlines, lies in eradicating poverty together with an emphasis on food security at the household level.

The 1974 World Food Conference led to major decisions. The International Fund for Agricultural Development was established as a financial institution with a specific mandate to alleviate rural poverty, hunger and malnutrition. The International Fund for Agricultural Development thus joined FAO and WFP in addressing distinct but strongly complementary aspects of strengthening food security - FAO by evolving agricultural strategies and providing technical support, IFAD through finance targeted to the poor and WFP with food aid.

The well-off rarely go hungry and the poor frequently do. The solution to their deprivation must be found in the marginal, so-called low potential areas where they live. Such areas may be low potential but we deal with people who are high potential. I am glad therefore to see that the Summit declaration has given strong emphasis to the needs of low potential areas.

Ironically, while rural women in developing countries produce the bulk of food and carry out its processing and preparation, women themselves are particularly vulnerable to hunger and poverty. Yet even the poorest men and women are able to grasp opportunities eagerly to improve their lives and make their families less vulnerable. The answer to their situation is not charity, rather it is creating a supportive micro-environment in which they have the means and resources to work their way out of poverty. The poor can then provide a thrust for development rather than be seen as merely an obstacle to growth. We have seen this demonstrated repeatedly in over 450 IFAD-supported projects in close to 106 countries in the world.

Credit, better technology and fair markets are the key elements in such a micro environment. Non-governmental organizations in local civil society organizing institutions can play a powerful role in fostering all three as well as helping the poor organize themselves and gain the capacity to take joint initiatives. Credit can indeed be particularly helpful in giving the poor access to better technology and inputs and thus raising their productivity. In IFAD projects we have found that group-based lending, undertaken in collaboration with informal associations of the poor and local NGOs, can sharply reduce transaction costs as well as eliminate the need for collateral while giving the borrowers a new sense of dignity and independence. Credit can also be effective in promoting rural micro-enterprises which are especially important for the landless.

But technologies have to be relevant to the conditions of the poor. For that reason, IFAD has been playing a leading role within the context of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the CGIAR system and with natural agricultural resource systems to bring together farmers' groups, NGOs, private sector organizations and international institutions. The aim is to develop and disseminate technologies suitable for smallholder farmers, with explicit emphasis on resource-poor areas, rainfed agriculture and rural poverty eradication.

In such resource-poor zones, desertification and land degradation pose a great threat to the livelihood and, indeed, the lives of millions. The recent United Nations Convention on Desertification offers a major new source of hope to poor groups struggling for survival in drought-prone zones. It is for this reason that IFAD and FAO have joined to take a leading part to assure the effective implementation of the Convention and help realize its ambitious goals, goals which are central to overcoming poverty and hunger.

These examples point the way to tantalizing possibilities that now exist to end hunger and poverty. Yet there are still far too many left without hope. What are today imaginative but scattered initiatives need to be linked together and turned into a wave that lifts the millions of hungry above the line of despair. Essential for this is to forge a wider operational coalition involving national and local governments and civil society institutions with the support of multilateral organizations to work with a common purpose under a shared agenda.

I am sure that this historic World Food Summit will point the way to bringing about such coalitions and realizing the noble ideal of Food for All, a World Without Hunger.