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By Lionel Yodhasinghe World Food Day and Tele-Food 2001 falls today. Fight Hunger to Reduce Poverty is the theme for this year and Tele-Food fund raising programs are held on this day in support of the program since its inception in 1997. So far, the program has earned about US$ 8 million to help the needy families to start small and self-sustaining food production projects costing between US$ 5000 and US$ 10,000 each. The organiser of this project, the Food and Agricultural Organisation, has already approved over 800 such projects in 100 countries. In a message to mark World Food Day, FAO Director General Jacques Diouf stated, “We are not giving people food, but the means to grow it for themselves, to achieve their own food security and become independent of aid”. More than 20 celebrities have already joined the Tele-Food fund raising campaign including musicians, actors and sports stars throughout the world. About 165 projects in 26 countries in the Asia Pacific region, 52 projects in seven countries in Europe, 100 projects in 13 countries in North Africa, 347 projects in 35 countries in Africa and 153 projects in 31 Latin American and Caribbean countries have got off the ground to help feed the hungry throughout the world. Women and community participation is more than 90 percent in many of these projects and among the projects launched are crop, animal and fish production etc. Mr. Diouf added that: “Five years ago world leaders met in Rome at the World Food Summit to pledge a solemn commitment to halve the number of hungry people from 800 million to 400 million by the year 2015. Although there are some countries that have made enormous strides in reducing hunger and poverty, the target set five years ago remains far away. The answer does not simply lie in boosting agricultural production. Ironically, the world now has enough food to feed every man, woman and child on the globe. If all the food produced in the world were to be shared equally among its inhabitants, every living person would have a daily intake of 2,760 calories, more than enough to lead a healthy and productive life. We all know that the reality is very different, and that for reasons of production, access and distribution, there are vast and unacceptable divides between those who have access to resources and those who do not. But those imbalances can be addressed. It will mean putting more focus, efforts and resources into rural areas, where 70 percent of the world’s poor and hungry people live. To improve access to food and income, rural areas need investments in health care, education, communications and infrastructure. That will require financing institutions, donors and national governments to channel more investment to agriculture. Instead, official development assistance to agriculture continues to drop. However, I am happy to note that as a result of the last G-8 Summit in Genoa, Italy in July, support to agriculture as a key element of Official Development Assistance as well as food security and rural development will be given emphasis at the core of poverty eradication strategies. I strongly believe that the notion of food for all is not an impossible dream, and that the target set in 1996 can still be met. When Governments come to Italy in November for the World Food Summit five years later, they will be asked to ensure that the promises they made were not empty ones. They will also be reminded that to make a world free from hunger a reality, they will need to commit the necessary resources and political will. Mr. Diouf remembered that wherever there were people who were chronically undernourished, there could be no hope for a world without poverty. “We must tackle both problems, and the time to fight hunger and reduce poverty is now”, he added.
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