Workshop 1
9.00 a.m.Eradicating hunger: interdependence of the Millennium Development Goals
Karl Popper and Konrad Lorenz - two old humming birds with very different ideas about the present and about mankind - once met in Altenburg and privately agreed on Man’s directional willpower: “all living things are in search of a better world”, every single living being is trying to find a better world “or at least is trying to stay, and keep afloat, for as long as possible where the world is a better place”. In addition, they share the view that “Nothing is set in stone, and everything is possible”.
These are unusually optimistic statements if pronounced in the opening session of a conference devoted to a problem which unhappily is by no means recent and has long been on the agenda of the world’s decision-makers, namely the insatiable monster of hunger decimating the peoples of the Earth (the “many-headed Hydra”, as Jean Ziegler puts it).
The immediate temptation in a context such as this would be to disarm in the face of the grim procession of data and bleak statistics regarding the desperate need for food in so many parts of the world, a need so far ruthlessly ignored. All of which sounds like a death knell for the commitment of the countries cooperating in the implementation of the UN project to halve the global mortality rate due to malnutrition by the year 2015.
The fact that achieving the desired result is judged by the UN leadership to be almost beyond the bounds of feasibility in the countries most direly stricken by hunger is in itself a sign that embarrassingly threatens to dash the hopes of any symposium on the subject. One need only think of the emblematic case of the African continent, where the combined threats of hunger, drought and the AIDS death toll has all too clearly reached devastating and dramatic proportions. In Africa, hunger is the main source of that vicious circle whereby hundreds of thousands of children are born HIV-positive and doomed to an existence of poverty and contagion as outcasts and orphans, denying entire nations any prospect of development or, indeed, of a future.
It is no accident that the UN has identified the eradication of hunger as its number one priority target, hunger being the grim harbinger of rampant sickness and disease and the driving force behind many of the other major aberrations and abominations that afflict mankind. However difficult and overambitious it may be to set oneself the task of combating hunger as the first Millennium Development Goal, once again it is plainly our duty to choose what type of folly or atrocity we should seek most urgently to control.
But if we return to our two great contemporary thinkers, Popper and Lorenz, and their conversation “by the fireside”, another point of agreement is that our will plays an essential role in all history. The issue could therefore be formulated in the words of Mother Teresa: “Everything depends on these words: “I want” or “I don’t want”. “I want” expresses all my energy and determination”.
“Will” figures prominently in the form of words used to introduce the seven fundamental commitments of the Plan of Action of the World Food Summit on World Food Security: “We will”. It is true that this may seem a daunting task, but even a decisive thrust might be enough.
Chairperson
Sheila Sisulu
(South Africa) Deputy Executive Director for Policy and External Affairs of the World Food Programme, the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency and each year, provides food assistance to an average of 90 million people in 80 countries, including 58 million children. In 2006, WFP development projects benefited 24.3 million people. Sheila Sisulu is a former Ambassador of South Africa to the USA.
Panel
Max Finberg
(USA) Lifelong anti-hunger advocate, Max Finberg is the Director of Alliance to End Hunger, a broad coalition that engages diverse institutions in building the public will to end hunger in the United States and worldwide. Under Finberg’s leadership, the Alliance has expanded to include more than 40 members in two years. It is a member of the United Nations’ International Alliance to End Hunger, where it joins similar efforts underway in 94 countries.
Richard Jolly
(United Kingdom) Senior Research Fellow at The City University of New York Graduate Center and Co-director of the UN Intellectual History Project. He is special adviser to the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and architect of the widely-acclaimed Human Development Report. Before this, he served for fourteen years as Deputy Executive Director for Programmes in UNICEF. In UNICEF, he was directly involved in efforts to ensure more attention to the needs of children and women in the making of economic adjustment policies, along the lines set out in the book he co-edited volume entitled, “Adjustment with a Human Face”.
Francis Kasasa
(Monaco) Consul of the Principality of Monaco in South Africa and General Secretary of Amade- Mondiale (The World Association of Children’s Friends), an internationally recognized NGO acting as an advocate for children’s rights through a network of 16 national affiliates in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe. The association was founded in 1963 by HSH Princess Grace of Monaco to support and develop humanitarian aid programmes, and protect children’s rights on an international level.
Adeline Lescanne
(France) A 28-year-old agricultural engineer and nutritionist, she is the public face of Nutriset, a company her father founded specializing in products to fight malnutrition. Nutriset first attracted attention with Plumpy’Nut, a high-protein and high-energy peanut-based paste which was widely used for the treatment of severely malnourished children in Darfur and Niger. Adeline Lescanne has been heading efforts to develop a franchise network of local Plumpy’Nut producers in Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, trying to reconcile humanitarian goals with capitalist methods.
Leonardo Palombi
(Italy) Scientific Director of the Drug Resource Enhancement against AIDS (DREAM) programme, which embodies a global approach to the care of AIDS sufferers in Africa, launched by the Community of Sant’Egidio. The priority target of the project is to ensure justice by offering AIDS victims in Africa the same care facilities – and the same hope – as are available in the Western world. The DREAM project, initiated in 2002 in Mozambique, has now been extended to other African countries, including Malawi.
Mary Shawa
(Malawi) Principal Secretary for Nutrition and HIV/AIDS for the Ministry of Health in Malawi, one of the countries with the highest HIV and AIDS infection rates. The spread of HIV has speeded up among the Malawi population because of the people’s poor nutritional capacity. There are currently about 83,000 children living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi, and 900,000 orphans who have lost one or both parents to AIDS-related illnesses. Mary Shawa has been working now for the Malawi Government for 30 years.
Massimo Urbani
(Italy) A physician, with a long experience in international cooperation, he is among the few Europeans who had the opportunity to work as a volunteer in North Korea in the mid- to late-1990s when the population experienced a devastating famine that killed an estimated three million people. Young children were among the first victims. Mr. Urbani and his wife Azar have been working in Pyongyang for ten years, to help the country reintegrate into the international community. Since 2002 he has been Resident Coordinator of the Italian Cooperation - Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.