Transcript Climate change, agriculture and food security

Lessons learned about
lessons learned about
hunger and the right to food
II ICID
Fortaleza, August 19, 2010
Marcos Ezequiel Filardi
[email protected]
Interdisciplinary Seminar on Hunger and the Right to Food
University of Buenos Aires - School of Law
A food-insecure (or hungry) world
•1.02 billion hungry
•90% in Asia and the Pacific
(642 million) and Africa (265
million)
•2 billion malnourished
•1 child dies every seven
seconds – 60 during this
presentation
•50% in the drylands
•75% are subsistence
farmers and pastoralists in
rural areas
Lesson 1:
There is enough food for all
•
In 1985 world´s food sufficiency – and one million starved to
death
•
25 years later, enough food to provide 2700 calories to 12
billion people –double of the current world population(FAO)
•
1 billion hungry and one billion with obesity
Lesson 2:
Nature´s not to blame: Hunger is a man-made disaster
•Natural phenomena
•Conflicts
•Human displacement
•Unfair trade
•Inefficient and disrupting aid
•Lack of or inadequate policies
•Unequal access to land, credit and inputs
•Concentration of the food chain
•Unemployment
•Lack of social safety nets
•Trade related intellectual property rights
•Globalization
•Problems of infrastructure
•Large scale acquisitions and leases and forced evictions
• Food devoted to energy-sources of protein
•Promotion of biofuels
•Market speculation
•Discrimination
Lesson 3:
Green revolution is not that green
•Contributes to climate change
•No sustainable use and pollution of fresh
water resources
•Soil degradation and depletion
•Biodiversity loss
•Land concentration
•Diet-related problems and malnutrition
Lesson 4:
Climate change is making matters worse for those already hungry
•Increase in 1-3 degrees will not affect world food production, but
adverse impacts at the regional level
•Adverse impacts on fisheries and livestock
•Those who contributed the least to climate change, and are already
the most food-insecure, will be the worst affected
•600 million new hungry (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights).
New famines.
•More than 3 degrees= total disruption of food production
Lesson 5:
There is a human right to adequate food
•Legal recognition of an ethical claim
•Naming and shaming
•Accountability
•Naming and shaming
•Mobilizing force and rallying point
•Local enforceability and justiciability
•International monitoring and supervision
There is a drought of courage.
There is a shortage of political will.
What is your science for, if it doesn´t serve to transform the reality?
What is your knowledge for, if it doesn´t serve to improve people´s lives?
When you abandon this world,
Try not only to have been good, because this is not enough,
But to abandon a good world.
Bertolt Brecht, Santa Juana de los Mataderos
Thank you.