World Summit delegates call for farm technology
Delegates at the World Summit on Sustainable Development today called for new agricultural technologies to be made available to poor farmers in the developing world.
The 10 day summit, which began in South Africa yesterday, is focused on uplifting the world’s poor and protecting the global environment.
“There is no point of having healthy children if they are going to die of malnutrition,” said Pedro Sanchez, former director of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry.
“Their is no point in being an environmentalist with an empty stomach.”
Meanwhile, negotiators continued trying to reach a compromise on the conference’s implementation plan, which many delegates hope will include detailed timetables for tackling problems of energy, biodiversity, food security, clean water and health care.
Developing nations are trying to extract more aid and greater access to Western markets and technology from the summit.
The US is resisting any new aid targets or timetables, while demanding that aid recipients reduce corruption.
The summit, which is being held in a Johannesburg convention centre attached to a shopping mall and business complex, was sealed off by concrete barriers and metal fences.
An 8,000-person security force is deployed to help prevent the kind of violence seen in past years’ international meetings in Seattle and Genoa.
During today’s session, many delegates railed against European agricultural subsidies, saying they made it difficult for poor farmers to compete on the world market.
Sanchez recommended that wealthy countries commit 5% of the money they spend on subsidies to fight hunger in the developing world.
An estimated 800 million people go hungry every year and about two-thirds of the world’s farmland is affected by land degradation.
Delegates said new technologies in fertilisers and other agricultural sectors could help reverse that trend, but those advances need to be shared with the developing world.
“We can roll back hunger immediately,” said MS Swaminathan, an expert on sustainable agriculture.
About 150,000 poor farmers in Africa were using new, sustainable technologies in fertiliser and soil replenishment and, as a result, were far more productive than their neighbours, Sanchez said.
“It can be done gentlemen. The question is do we have the political will to do it,” he said.
