INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION (ILO) - ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DU TRAVAIL - ORGANIZACION INTERNACIONAL DEL TRABAJO

Ms. Katherine Hagen, Deputy Director-General, International Labour Organization (ILO)

As the world community mobilizes its support to assure the delivery of emergency aid in central Africa, we are here at this Summit to reinforce our commitment to combatting food insecurity wherever it occurs. For the ILO, food security encompasses the ability to produce and to purchase sufficient, safe and nutritious food. Since production and food purchasing capacity are both rooted in employment, the ILO's mandate to promote full employment is an important element in the strategy for achieving food security.

This raises three major issues. First, food production must be decisively stepped up wherever there is a food deficit. Sixty-one percent of the labour force in low-income countries is in agriculture, and it is the productivity of this labour which must be raised. This requires that policies facilitate access, primarily of small producers in rural areas, to productive resources, land, water, capital and machinery. Particular attention must be given to women producers by ensuring that such policies simultaneously promote gender equality and productive capacity.

The second issue hinges on the availability of productive employment. The chronic inability to purchase food in sufficient quantity and quality is primarily an expression of inadequate food purchasing capacity as a result of low earnings of workers in low productivity occupations. Over one billion persons are estimated to live in poverty today, primarily as a result of inadequate employment and underemployment. When employment cannot sustain a living wage the food security of workers and their families is jeopardized.

One strategy to improve the ability of low-income groups to purchase their food requirements lies in employment-intensive infrastructural investment policies. Infrastructure can be built, and maintained using cost-effective, high-quality labour-intensive methods. Such policies provide a stimulus for rural non-farm employment in small and micro-enterprises, thereby further diversifying rural employment as a basis for food security.

The conditions under which food is produced make up the third issue. Food produced under unsafe conditions cannot be considered safe for consumption. But in many countries, the capacity to introduce and monitor a safe working environment, particularly in the area of food production, is admittedly very weak. We must work with our Member States to improve that capacity, but we also recognize the importance of certain fundamental rights.

In Copenhagen, on the occasion of the Social Summit last year, certain fundamental workers' rights were identified, based on ILO standards, for the promotion of fair and equitable employment.

The application of these basic principles to rural workers, who today remain the most poverty-stricken occupational group, enduring the lowest wages and harshest conditions of work, is a task requiring urgent attention. Measures to strengthen rural workers' organizations and their collective bargaining capacity must be a priority. Assistance in the formation and management of cooperatives is also essential to enable small producers to enter market competition. Small and medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing and services, furthermore, hold the promise of generating much-needed employment opportunities.

As we all look to intensifying our efforts to reform and improve coordination among our international institutions, to assist more effectively our Member States with the commitments articulated here in the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action, the ILO stands ready to extend its full collaboration in the areas of its mandate to enhance programme complementarity, to focus on common priority themes and objectives and, most importantly, to mobilize overall policies to make a difference.