G20: Food for everyone please

The message being sent out to G-20 leaders by the European Economic and Social Committee’s international conference Food for everyone – towards a global deal, held on May 23 in Brussels, is clear: the world’s growing population needs food security as well as food.  

“Food security concerns us all, it is about the resources we all share and use. We simply cannot afford a new agriculture crisis in global markets,” said Staffan Nilsson, EESC president, during the conference.

The conference, organized by the EESC in partnership with the European Commission, brought together representatives of the UN, the FAO, G-20 presidency, the EU and international civil society.

 

Keynote speakers and conference contributors, which included Dacian Ciolos, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, highlighted some of the urgent challenges threatening food security globally such as price volatility, climate change, demographic pressures, scarcity of water and land resources and lack of transparent information on markets.

 

“Food security must be a core component of our development support policies. There can be no real food security if it is not shared by everyone. Agriculture must return to the centre of the development agenda, with the key objective of increasing global production capacity by creating favourable conditions for public and private investment for farmers worldwide”, said Ciolos.

 

In his closing remarks, Nilsson said that: “We need stronger political will to enable farmers to earn sufficient income and to strengthen small-scale farmers’ capacity to organise themselves more effectively. Investment in sustainable and inclusive agriculture is investment in the future. And let’s not forget that at global scale, the most typical farmer is a woman”.

 

Nilsson’s conclusions will be submitted as a set of recommendations to the French presidency of G-20 and are meant as an innovative and balanced contribution to the forthcoming G-20 meeting of agriculture ministers in June.

 

The recommendations to G-20 agreed on by the conference participants include: smarter and longer-term investment in agriculture, especially in developing countries; greater international coordination – countries and international organisations need to coordinate and, more than ever, to act in a coherent way; regional integration on trade and capacity-building to enable farmers to organise themselves more effectively.

The conference deliberations are being web-streamed on the EESC online platform dedicated to food security. Some of the event sessions are being recorded and will be made available by EbS, the EU audiovisual service and EUX.TV. Watch the EESC President Nilsson’s video message