Towards a global policy agenda: the World Food Summit in the context of international development summit in the 1990s
Kracht, U.
Food security and nutrition the global challenge: 631-653
1999
Document Number: 242703
The paper analyses the World Food Summit which was held in Rome in November 1996 and which concluded an unprecedently intense series of global development summits and conferences, which, taken together, mapped out the development agenda leading into the third millennium. The Summit did not propose major new initiatives which would have meant greatly increased resources to be channelled to food and agriculture. Instead, it accepted that hunger will be the scourge of millions of people for decades to come: even if its objectives can be met, there are likely to be at least 400 million hungry people in the world some 20 years from now. Against this background, one Summit initiative takes on particular importance: with its call for defining the operational meaning of the frequently invoked right to food, the Summit intended to move from the level of rhetorical declarations to applying an ethics-based human rights approach to development. Application of a right-to-food approach is no panacea for overcoming current obstacles to hunger- and poverty eradication, but it holds promise to make efforts in that direction more effective.