TANZANIA - TANZANIE

His Excellency Benjamin William Mkapa, President of the United Republic of Tanzania

I should like to begin by expressing my government's full support to the holding and the purpose of this timely and historic World Food Summit as well as its Declaration and Plan of Action. Food is among the most basic and universal of all human requirements for survival. It does not matter how rich or poor we are, whether young or old, male or female, each one of us equally needs and is divinely entitled to food security and a decent, dignified and self-reliant human existence.

Sustainable access to adequate and affordable food is a basic human right and our collective humanity will be put to question as long as some of our fellow human beings are deprived of it. This Summit meeting is a veritable test of our individual and collective political will to go beyond lofty words and translate into urgent concrete action the ethical and political imperative to guarantee food security to every human being.

This call to urgent action is being made in the light of our experience with previous efforts to achieve food security for all people. This is not our first attempt. The international obligation to ensure food security and the wellbeing of all people is implied in the United Nations Charter. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes access to adequate food as a basic human right. United Nations organs such as FAO, WFP and IFAD were established in pursuit of this goal.

In 1974 we convened here in Rome for a World Food Conference focusing world attention on continuing and chronic food shortages and nutritional deficiencies. Today, 20 years later, we are assembled here yet again with the same goal in mind. Progress has been made, but not sufficient progress. For, despite all these previous policy initiatives, and the structures we have built over time to implement them, 800 million people are still chronically undernourished, 200 million children under the age of five continue to suffer protein and energy deficiencies, and 20 percent of all people in developing countries are always hungry in a world of plenty - a world where a few eat much more than they need and should, and sometimes die as a result, and where existing scientific knowledge can easily be harnessed to produce enough food for everyone.

Unless we address this gross contradiction our present Declaration and Plan of Action will, like its predecessors, come to naught. That must not happen. But coming in the wake of a globalized, liberalized and competitive market, our words must be backed by even greater political will in each capitol to uphold the letter and spirit of the Declaration and the implementation of the Plan.

We also need enlightened and collective action. As long as new technology, including biotechnology remains the private and commercial property of a few multinational companies; as long as the farmers with the capacity and knowhow to produce food surpluses are subsidized and discouraged from producing in order to prop up food prices while poor farmers are denied subsidies for increased food production; and as long as our poor farmers lack the requisite knowledge, skills, resources and capacity to produce and stock food surpluses, food security for all will remain a distant dream.

Tanzania can largely be considered self-sufficient in food, except for the ten-year cycle of food deficiency. But we remain vulnerable to weather, to pests and to environmental degradation. Insufficient food production, high post-harvest losses, inefficient market systems, poor transportation and communication networks, inadequate credit facilities, and low incomes among vulnerable groups, all contribute to put our food security at risk.

Government's role is central to the solution of these problems so as to give our people the capacity for self-development. We are encouraging the role of free cooperative societies and cooperative unions that can take care of a wide cross-section of the farmers' concerns including agricultural credit, availability of inputs, and marketing of agricultural produce. We have liberalized agricultural marketing while maintaining a strategic grain reserve.

The greatest problem with food security in the world is not the global capacity to produce sufficient food, but the will to share knowledge and resources, and improve the distribution of the produced food. We cannot, therefore, address the question of food security without addressing poverty - poverty of ideas, poverty of resources, poverty of capacity to produce or purchase adequate food, and above all poverty of human kindness.

In my view, the most sustainable way to ensure food security for all is empowerment for self-reliant food production, processing, storage and distribution. No one likes the indignity of having to beg for food. The problem before us, therefore, is essentially one of empowerment, of capacity-building, and of facilitating the exercise and expression of this inherent spirit of self-reliance. Governments and the international community cannot escape their duty to contribute to this process.

The time has come to address the needs of the small-scale farmer who has been neglected for too long in too many poor countries, especially in Africa, where women produce almost 80 percent of all the food. We have an obligation to make a special effort to support women, and empower them with an enhanced capacity for food production. The question of land ownership for women and their participation in planning and decision-making are important. Access to extension services, affordable agricultural inputs, easy credit facilities, subsidies and the use of simple science and technology to reduce their workload and increase their productivity are all deserving of immediate attention.

Scientific and technological empowerment of the small-scale farmer, both male and female, is not for purposes of increasing agricultural production and productivity only. It is also for better management of our agricultural resources including land, forests and water. We must bequeath to our progeny a natural resource base that will continue to sustain them with adequate nutrition.

Food security in Africa will remain a mirage unless we learn how to sustainably use our abundant water resources for agriculture. We need to empower the small-scale farmer with simple technology, low investment, but effective water control and water use techniques that can increase productivity and stabilize erratic food production that depends far too often on the whims of nature.

Tanzania is a country richly endowed with rivers, lakes and groundwater. Out of the 43 million hectares of arable land, only 6.3 million hectares or 15 percent of the land is under cultivation; and out of the one million hectares suitable for irrigation only a mere 152 000 hectares are currently under irrigation. With the commendable support of FAO we are slowly empowering our people to use this irrigation potential through smallholder community projects.

Rural development should be comprehensive covering sectors such as livestock, forestry and fisheries that are all critical for food security and which, together with agriculture, are the main sources of livelihood and progress for rural people. But, in order for progress to be truly rooted in the communities concerned, the question of education, information, health, as well as physical, financial, and technological empowerment of the small-scale farmer, livestock keeper, or fisherman needs to be addressed and enhanced.

Governments have a delivery role in this critical and unavoidable task. But as long as African Governments continue to be laden with the suffocating debt burden - now approaching US$ 250 billion for sub-Saharan Africa,they will have very few resources left for contributing to peasant capacity-building and empowerment. Tanzania, for example, with a per capita income of less than US$ 150, has a per capita debt of US$ 280. We spend over one-third of our budget to service only a part of our debt. We spend US$ 5 per capita on debt service, but only US$ 3 per capita on health and education combined. We appreciate the newly proposed initiatives on debt relief, but urgent action is required to translate the initiatives into actual and tangible relief on our external payments' obligations, and the augmentation of our agricultural extension delivery service system.

Peace and security are important prerequisites for food security. The millions of displaced people and refugees in the Great Lakes region have had their lives and food production capacities disrupted. Food producers have been uprooted from their land and now suffer the indignity of subsisting on the charity of others. In Eastern Zaire, many might die before water and food relief supplies reach them. The root cause of their suffering needs to be addressed.

In the meantime, the hungry, whether in Eastern Zaire or elsewhere in Africa, cannot wait for the measures we discuss here today to bear fruit. They need food now, today, so that they can live and have the physical strength to take care of themselves tomorrow. Food assistance must remain therefore an important component of our food security strategy in the short term.

In conclusion, I wish to commend the FAO Director-General for convening and organizing so well this World Food Summit. Mr. Director-General, you have brought honour to our continent. I thank the Italian Government for its hospitality and good arrangements for this meeting. I thank all of you who came to provide the political will and support required to implement the Declaration and Plan of Action. But to succeed we need sustainable and consistent world partnership and solidarity. We, in Tanzania, will do all in our power to implement the Rome Declaration and Plan of Action and, in this endeavour, we will cooperate with all who share this noble objective.