World Food Week 2011 Wrap Up
30,000 people signed our petition in Bangladesh
With the World Food Week HungerFREE activities behind us, I have been reflecting on the amazing collective efforts across ourActionAid global network – one thing is for sure it makes me proud to be an ActionAider!
In Bangladesh a 30,000 person strong petition – with signatures collected across rural areas - was handed over to the Bangladesh government. In South Africa 200 rural women marched on the Parliament buildings to demand the government support them. In Brazil, in addition to our HungerFREE campaign activities, we gained massive amounts of media coverage from the launching of our Hunger-FREE’s scorecard report getting interviews in most major media outlets.
And that’s just a taster…what’s clear is that by standing in solidarity with women farmers, we’ve helped ensure that leaders hear their demand to be supported to grow their own way out of poverty.
Personally, I have had the very great pleasure of attending two events in two different countries over the last week. The first event I attended was the rural women’s march in my home country of South Africa. The second was in Rwanda, where I gave a presentation of the HungerFREE global report to the Rwandan government’s ‘Permanent Secretary on Agriculture’. This was a great opportunity to celebrate the recent successes in tackling hunger in Rwanda and learn lessons in moving forward.
Rwanda is well known for the devastating genocide which took place in 1994: what is less well-known are the hugestrides the country has made recently in tackling hunger. These green shoots of agricultural recovery are thanks to increased investments in agriculture. Through strong government commitment to agriculture, Rwanda has made impressive progress in a short space of time in reducing levels of hunger and poverty. For example, it is set to meet the international target to halve child malnutrition, way ahead of many ‘wealthier’ nations.
This progress was made possible by the introduction of a government policy which supports smallholders with crucial farming tools and seeds, while expanding irrigation and supporting environmentally sustainable production methods to tackle the endemic problems of soil erosion in the country. As one of the world's most densely populated landlocked countries, and with the vast majority of agriculture taking place on eroding hillside soil, these steps have been vital to Rwandan progress. It is this progress which has seen Rwanda climb-up Hunger-FREE’s scorecard rankings this year to an impressive 3rd place.
Alongside other countries that have also done well in tackling hunger one thing is clear, when governments put their energies behind the right hunger-tackling policies, great strides can be taken towards eradicating hunger.
ActionAid’s campaign team is now taking a very short breath before moving our efforts to targeting leaders at the G20 and UN climate Summits later in the year. We know that global hunger can be eradicated if countries agree on the right solutions and we will be pushing for this at these two international summits this November -- one in Europe and one in Africa. On November 3rd and 4th, the G20 Summit in Cannes, France, need to put policies in place that will help end hunger around the world and agree to invest in smallholder farmers.
Later in the same month, an ambitious climate deal, at the UN Climate Conference in Durban meeting, could help the smallholder farmers that will be among the worst affected by climate change. Stay tuned to join us on this journey!