SOUTH ASIAN ASSOCIATION FOR REGIONAL COOPERATION (SAARC) - ASSOCIATION SUD-ASIATIQUE DE COOPERATION REGIONALE - ASOCIACION DEL ASIA MERIDIONAL PARA LA COOPERACION REGIONAL

Mr. Naeem U. Hasan, Secretary-General, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)

I deem it a great honour to participate in this World Food Summit and to address this august body in my capacity as Secretary-General of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

I convey our most sincere thanks to the Director-General of FAO for his timely initiative to convene this Summit, to consider one of the most serious problems confronting us: hunger. I also congratulate the Chairman and Vice-Chairmen of the Summit on their election and thank the Government of Italy for all the courtesies extended to us.

The issues before this Summit are of crucial importance. More than 20 years ago another World Food Summit had pledged to eradicate hunger and malnutrition from our planet by the end of this century. Only four more years divide us from a new millennium. The question which must be foremost in our minds at this juncture is, where do we stand in achieving this objective?

The facts and figures in this regard, to say the least, are most disconcerting, as even today, more than 800 million people in the developing world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. It is equally disturbing that more than 200 million children under the age of five suffer from acute or chronic protein energy deficiencies. In South and South-East Asia, the situation is particularly serious. An alarming 500 million individuals, equivalent to 67 percent of the total chronically undernourished people of the developing world live in this region.

The SAARC countries believe that this is an unsustainable and unacceptable situation. All nations, individually, and the entire international community collectively, must rise to address this problem with a single-minded determination. We in the SAARC region are convinced that hunger is not only debilitating but it is also destabilizing with serious implications for peace and the orderly progress of our national societies and the entire international community.

I am pleased to inform that a meeting of the SAARC Agricultural Ministers was held in Islamabad, Pakistan in October 1996 to consider all the major issues before this Summit, and the meeting adopted a comprehensive resolution highlighting the common SAARC prospective on the issue of hunger and malnutrition. We had forwarded this as one of our inputs to the Secretary-General of the conference. The meeting strongly underscored that while national efforts must continue to remain the main element of any strategy to eradicate hunger, it is equally important to forge a strong global coalition for action to secure food security. The coalition must implement effective steps at all levels - international, regional and national to promote food security.

The SAARC Agriculture Ministers also resolve that we cannot conceive of a solution to the chronic problem of hunger without a sustained increase in our food production. Comprehensive actions must therefore be taken to increase agricultural production through enhanced investment, effective utilization of appropriate technology, improvement in soil fertility and the optimal use of water resources. Human resources development and an improvement in the institutional environment for growth in the agricultural sector must also continue.

We must also base all our actions on the fundamental recognition of the fact that the eradication of poverty and hunger and malnutrition are two faces of the same coin. Poverty, reinforced by rapid population growth has been a daunting element of our food problems and food security. The SAARC countries have committed themselves to the eradication of poverty from the SAARC region preferably by the year 2002. We believe that the creation of an enabling international environment, supportive of our national poverty eradication programmes would go a long way towards helping the SAARC region to eradicate hunger and malnutrition.

The SAARC countries strongly believe that the evolving trade regimes in agricultural products should fully take into account the particular needs of the developing countries. There is a need for special programmes for bilateral and multilateral assistance to compensate the developing countries to overcome difficulties due to trade liberalization measures.

The issues before the present World Food Summit are not simple ones. They are complex and difficult requiring a comprehensive and concerted approach to address them. We thus welcome the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action and hope that all of us would be able to move ahead in order to promote action and reinforce meaningful cooperation so that the objectives are actually realized. The SAARC countries would spare no efforts to meaningfully contribute to our common and relentless endeavour to translate the dream of a world free from hunger and malnutrition into a reality.