October 17, 2002	Thursday	Sha'aban 10, 1423

GENEVA: The United Nations demonstrates a tendency towards schizophrenia in its approaches to agricultural reform and fighting world hunger, says Swiss academic Jean Ziegler, the global forum’s special rapporteur on the right to food.

Programmes aimed at agrarian reform, after more than two decades in near-oblivion, returned to the international community’s agenda through the commitments made in the declaration signed in Rome at the 1996 World Food Summit.

But the final declaration of the second summit on food, which took place this June, again in Rome, omitted the issue, even though two UN agencies back agrarian reform models as a means to improve food security: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In contrast, the World Bank promotes different models of agrarian reform, which place priority on the market and follow the trend set by what is known as the ‘Washington Consensus’, said Ziegler in a statement issued on the eve of World Food Day, celebrated every year on Oct 16, the anniversary of the FAO’s creation.

Ziegler, the UN Commission on Human Rights’ special rapporteur for the right to food, describes the Washington Consensus, made up of governments and institutions with a neo-liberal bent, as being ‘intrinsically opposed to policies that tend towards achieving social equality’.

In highlighting this apparent contradiction, the expert commented that the UN system suffers from ‘schizophrenia’.

This incoherence, he said, also extends within the UN to its agencies’ attitudes about the right to food, one of the human rights consecrated by international law.

Half of the UN system, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a large number of the UN’s member states are, in practice, against the right to food, said Ziegler, commenting that they believe the market is the only power that should establish food prices.

Meanwhile, other UN agencies, like the FAO, World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), do ‘magnificent work in development,’ but their efforts often end up annulled by the policies of the IMF, said the rights rapporteur.

To carry out its global mandate, the FAO has a budget that is an ‘infinitesimally small’ portion of the $345 billion the industrialized countries spend each year on subsidising their farm production and exports.

As such, we find ourselves in a schizophrenic situation, asserted Ziegler, whose own mandate is to report to the two main bodies of the UN — the General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights — about progress and obstacles in the fight against world hunger.

The panorama Ziegler sketched, just in time for World Food Day, is ‘atrocious’. Hunger and malnutrition are condemning a million people in the world to underdevelopment and early death, he said.

Every seven seconds, a child under age 10 dies as a result, directly or indirectly, of hunger.

It is not fatality that lies behind the analysis of these figures, he said. The hardships that are killing these people are the result of human actions. Behind every victim of hunger, there is an assassin, stated the expert.

The continued unequal distribution of food resources constitutes a fundamental political error, in Ziegler’s opinion.

“The international community must fight terrorism, but a war against terrorism without a war against misery — with equal or even greater means — is doomed in advance,” Ziegler said.

Another concern of the rapporteur is what he describes as the utilisation of hunger as a political weapon or as an instrument of war to subdue a minority population.

Ziegler cited the example of the Palestinian occupied territories, where Israeli military actions are blocking food shipments and the Palestinian population’s access to their fields.

A group of non-governmental organizations, based in Israel, United States and Palestine, backed Ziegler in a denunciation aimed at the Israeli government about the food situation in the occupied territories.

Their report states that 13.2 per cent of Palestinian children under age five suffer acute malnutrition, a serious problem because it halts the development of brain cells, as well as causing other severe health problems.

Ziegler, a sociologist and professor at the University of Geneva, has spurred controversy in other arenas as well, particularly in his home country.

He has published books with titles like “Switzerland Washes Whiter” and “Switzerland: the Gold and the Dead”, which refer to the Swiss banking system and the accounts belonging to Jews who were murdered under Germany’s Nazi regime during World War II.

But he has also conducted research on the inequalities between the countries of the industrialized North and the developing South, and disseminated his findings in a book released this week.

Ziegler surprised the European media in August when he issued statements — though not as a UN representative — in which he justified the expropriation of lands of white farmers in Zimbabwe.

He said in an interview at the time with the Swiss weekly L’Hebdo, “It’s absurd that 25 years after the war of liberation, colonial lands continue to exist in Zimbabwe.”

The academic, stressing that he was speaking personally, said the government of Zimbabwe, under President Robert Mugabe, is widely considered to lack democracy. But he said history and morality are on Mugabe’s side, although the current situation is unfolding in “a detestable context”.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.