Three United Nations bodies have called on the global community to
place food security and nutrition at the centre of Africa’s development
Agenda.
The three Rome-based United Nations agencies; the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural
Development, (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said supporting
smallholder farmers in Africa is a panacea to improving global food
security and empowering rural women.
According to the three bodies addressing gender inequalities
would
transform the lives of women as well as the lives of their families and
communities.
The three bodies stated this in a joint statement issued on Tuesday
and made valuable to the Ghana News Agency in Accra by Yumiko Arai, of
the FAO office in Japan.
According to the statement, José Graziano da Silva, Director-General
of the FAO; Kanayo Nwanze, the President of the IFAD, and Ertharin
Cousin, Executive Director of the WFP, stated at the Fifth Tokyo
International Conference on African Development (TICAD V) in Yokohama.
The three agency heads said that the most effective key to reversing
hunger and poverty in developing countries lay in responsible investment
by governments and the private sector in sustainable agricultural and
rural development.
The statement noted that in sub-Saharan Africa, Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) growth generated by agriculture had been shown to be
eleven times more effective in reducing poverty than GDP growth in other
sectors.
It stated that it was time to invest in the critical agents of
change: small producers and their organizations, family farmers,
fishers, livestock keepers, forest users, rural workers, entrepreneurs
and indigenous people.
The FAO, IFAD and WFP heads however commended countries that had made
strong efforts to reduce hunger within their boundaries and on the
African continent in general.
The three agencies indicated that the discussions at TICAD would help
inform the high-level meeting to be held on June 30 and July 1, in
Addis Ababa, co-organized by the African Union, FAO and supported by the
Lula Institute.
The three bodies agreed that hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty
should remain at the core of the post-2015 agenda, following the
deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, and expressed confidence
that the world could overcome the twin scourges of poverty and hunger
within a generation.
The statement said, they however, issued a warning that this would
not be achieved unless we address the underlying causes of gender
inequality and lift the barriers to the empowerment of women – the main
producers, processors and traders of food in Africa, despite the fact
that 85 present of agricultural land was owned by men.
Source: GNA
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