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Devinder Sharma

"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much for you, apply the following test: Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away."

— Mahatma Gandhi

THEY came, they spoke and they lost. The Heads of State, who had assembled for the recently concluded World Food Summit `five years later' at Rome, spoke eloquently about the scandalous `scourge' of prevailing hunger, and yet provided only a diet of verbosity to the millions of hungry and malnourished.

They spoke about the urgent need to remove global hunger and, yet, could not look beyond depressing figures that simply need to be juggled around in the fight against hunger. They came to draw global attention to mankind's greatest shame but in reality promoted biotechnology under the garb of hunger and food insecurity.

After all, in an era of market economy, where contesting the next elections is the biggest challenge that confronts the political leaders all over the world and without exception, the heads of state did not think even once before unabashedly promoting the commercial interests of the corporations.

The hungry will, therefore, have to wait. And wait endlessly for another Mahatma Gandhi to emerge on the horizon and to lead the march against hunger, poverty and inequality.

If only the leaders who attended the ritual of meaningless summits had read Mahatma Gandhi's talisman, there would have been hope and optimism emerging from the dark clouds of hunger and malnutrition.

For days before the meet began, the drafting committees were locked in debate over defining a code of conduct for the `right to food'. As if the `right to food' is a magic wand that makes the supermen of the political hierarchy deliver food to the hungry and the desperately needy, the G-77 countries, the European Union and the US fought relentlessly for and against it. Finally, the world's only superpower succeeded in foisting its will on the rest of the world. The code of conduct was replaced by the word `guidelines', as the US had initially wanted, and the final draft was ready for signatures.

The right-based approach to hunger and malnutrition was expected to challenge unwilling governments to change policies. At the same time, it aimed at giving the victims of violations the means to seek redress and claim "good governance" by giving them the power of political and economic participation. In addition, a code of conduct was also expected to allow civil society and the national judiciary to guarantee the right to food. Laudable intentions, indeed.

But what the promoters of the right-based approach — and that included the German government and the German NGOs — did not probably realise is that the `right to food' in a majority of the developing countries where hunger persists, is enshrined in their Constitutions.

The code of conduct becomes meaningless when the governments all over the world, and that includes the US, are more interested in pushing the commercial interests of industry and the corporate empire than addressing the problems of hunger and inequity.

Take the case of India, where the shameful paradox of plenty fails to galvanise the government to wage a war against hunger and malnutrition. And that too in a country, where over 65 million tonnes of foodstock are rotting in the open.

The Supreme Court had last year directed the Government to "devise a scheme where no person goes hungry when the granaries are full and food is wasted due to non-availability of storage space."

The Supreme Court's directive came in 2001. A year later, all that the Government has done is to play around with figures and statistics. Another document, in the form of a code of conduct for the `right to food', is certainly not going to move the government into action. Nor will it provide the much-needed weapon for the victims of apathy and neglect to fight for their rights. The monumental task, therefore, cannot be achieved by yet another carefully worded document that comes from the Food and Agriculture Organisation. It requires an instrument more powerful than the lack of political will that the FAO Director-General, Mr Jacques Diouf, refers to.

What Mr Diouf needs to acknowledge is that it is because of the prevailing political will all over that hunger is multiplying. It is because the political will is in resonance with the forces that aim at exploiting the hungry and the poor, that the entire global system is directed towards extracting its "pound of flesh" from even the starving masses. Such a disgraceful system has its roots firmly embedded in the FAO and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

At the first World Food Summit, also held in Rome in 1996, the heads of state had pledged to achieve the objective of halving the number of hungry by 2015. This meant an annual reduction in the number of hungry by approximately 22 million. Even this has not been achieved, the FAO regrettably observed. And still, the 182 member-countries, represented by some 81 heads of state and high-level delegations, once again reiterated the commitment to reduce to half the world's hunger, which in other words, means pulling out 400 million people from the hunger trap, by 2015. Even if the FAO and the international community fail to set the hunger agenda in motion, over 122 million hungry would have perished in any case by then.

It is here that global greed comes into focus. While the boring speeches continued in the main plenary, the US was busy pushing its own commercial interests. The US Secretary of Agriculture, Ms Ann Veneman, made no secret of her intentions when she said: "Biotechnology has tremendous potential to develop products that can be more suited to areas of the world where there is persistent hunger," adding, "there is no food safety issue whatsoever." It was primarily for this reason that the US had all along wanted strong language in the final declaration in favour of genetically-modified food as the key to solving hunger and malnutrition.

No wonder, the US announced a $100-million programme to develop genetically-modified crops and products tailored specifically to the needs of the developing countries. Its entire research and aid development programmes, ably backed by the World Bank, IMF and the WTO, are aimed at building the US into a food power — so that the rest of the world becomes completely dependent upon the US for its food needs.

This can only be achieved by ensuring that the trade rules are so framed that the benefits mainly percolate to the American farm sector and, second, by gradual destruction of the capacity of the developing countries to go in for food self-sufficiency.

Biotechnology is the only tool that can usher in the great hunger divide — between the rich industrialised countries and the poor developing economies, between the heavily subsidised OECD agriculture and the subsistence farming of the Third World, and between the seed-rich countries of the North and the gene-rich nations of the South. The stage has been clearly set for a major confrontation on the food front.

Biotechnology only aims to force peasants and marginal farmers off their meagre land holdings. Biotechnology may aim to bring in an era of novel foods and functional foods so as to provide the hungry with a choice. But what it forgets is that given a choice, all that the hungry need is simple food.

By refusing to address the immediate crisis on the hunger front, the Summit failed and failed miserably. Except for the decorative part of the final declaration, the Summit failed to spell out the initiatives on how to immediately tackle prevailing hunger and malnutrition, on how to ensure that the tragedies of Malawi and Zimbabwe, which are still deep in the quagmire of famine and starvation, are not repeated elsewhere.

The onus does not only rest with the heads of state. The FAO and CGIAR are equally responsible for the food debacle. If only the FAO/CGIAR refuse to chant the biotechnology mantra, if only the two global farm research and development organisations refuse to comply with the research agenda of the western countries, and if only these institutions were to reiterate their commitment to the farming communities and sustainable farming practices in the developing countries, the onerous task of feeding the world without destroying the resource life-line could be easily achieved.

With good science now being replaced with `sound science', as advocated by the industry, the poor and hungry will have to wait as they cannot add to the corporate profits.

If only the political leadership, the industry, agricultural scientists and civil society had followed Mahatma Gandhi's talisman, the world would not have been witness to mankind's greatest shame — hunger, and that too in times of plenty. There is no need to wait for another Mahatma, the need is to follow what the Mahatma said. And then, there would be no need for another World Food Summit.

(The author is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst.)

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