So where are we in the fight against global hunger now that the London G-20 summit is over? Pretty much where we were the day before it started, says Nancy Roman.
I’m choosing to view the G-20 communique as lost opportunity for the hungry rather than a travesty. Unsurprisingly, the leaders spent their much anticipated 8-and-a-quarter pages defining and articulating one more time the big economic problems and then building a plan aimed at “strengthening the financial system.”
Modernize institutions
They bundled much of what has been done (cutting interest rates, for example) with promises that are easier to make than to keep (guarding against protectionism). Somewhere around page 4, they detailed the spending we were all most eager to see, much of it to “modernize the international financial institutions.” These things do matter.
So when I hear world leaders like Gordon Brown say with conviction “global problems require global solutions”, I admit I was surprised that the G-20 communique made only a fleeting reference to the “human dimension to the crisis.” And that seemed to mean job loss – rather than its associated poverty and resulting hunger.
The Bottom Billion?
A billion people go to bed hungry every night. Last year we saw how quickly hunger spurred food riots and social unrest in more than 30 countries. While it has been and will be hard for hunger to make a big cut in a competition among global economic strife, climate change, and other international issues, it is hard to accept that yesterday, the bottom billion didn’t make the cut at all.
Hunger is coming down the pike hard and fast as the financial crisis bears down on the poor. For those of us who see this happening and who understand not only the loss of human potential but the peace and stability risks associated with it, the unfolding of the G-20 is a lesson. Traditional institutions may not be the ones to lead us out of this problem.
Online mobilization
In my opinion, one positive aspect of this G-20 was the large scale grassroots mobilization in the streets and, in particular, online through the social web. Read this BBC article G20: the social media battle or this one G20 summit protestors use Twitter... from Britain's Daily Telegraph. On Facebook, the G20 Meltdown group accumulated 3,000 members in under a week. According to Hashtags.org, which measures the number of tweets for a certain issue, there were more than 4,500 tweets about the G-20 in the first six hours of April 3.
Much of this mobilization was about putting people first. I am hoping that these voices will have an even more influential role in the summits to come.
Director of Communications, Public Policy, Communications and Private Partnerships
Nancy E. Roman became Director of Public Policy, Communications and Private Partnerships of the UN World Food Programme in August 2007. Ms Roman supervises a global staff covering operations in 80 countries.
Comments
In my opinion, nothing was done or written about hunger and in general for least development countries. The clause "not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too" diplomatically means that first of all interests of the developed world will be taken into account and after, maybe the ones of the developing countries...
In general they should have changed a system that showed to have failed completely but at the end thay are using the same method, changing some small things to keep on with the same unsafe, useless and unfair system.
Very disappointing.
Well, I think that there's an awful lot of questions unanswered... Hunger in the world being one of them!
The web has already proved itself to be a great watchdog... the online community will continue to draw attention to government short comings!