Ireland key in moving food up world agenda

Ireland's leading role in campaigning against world hunger has "really paid off" and we need to build on this as the United Nations draws up new development goals, according to the former head of Concern Worldwide, Tom Arnold.

Arnold is a man of many roles – including chairing The Irish Times Trust – but food is the common thread that runs through his lengthy career. He studied agricultural economics, served as assistant secretary general of the Department of Agriculture and tackled hunger in the developing world directly as chief executive of Concern.

These days he co-ordinates the Scaling Up Nutrition (Sun) Movement, a UN initiative that aims to move food issues up the global agenda and make real inroads into the problem of undernutrition.

He’s doing the job on an interim basis but it’s clearly grist to his mill. This week brings a high-water mark for his efforts, with two gatherings in Rome set to put the focus squarely on nutrition.

First up is the global gathering of the Sun Movement, which started yesterday and will review progress since the organisation was set up on the initiative of the Irish and US governments in 2010. "From no one committed four years ago, we're up to 54 countries, accounting for over half the undernourished children in the world."

Later this week, Pope Francis and Minister for Health Leo Varadkar are just two of the attendees due at the Second International Conference on Nutrition, organised by the UN and World Health Organisation.

Malnourishment

The language of such international conferences can seem bland, but the problems they are discussing are very real. More than 800 million people in the world are undernourished and 161 million people are affected by chronic malnourishment. Meanwhile, acute malnourishment, or wasting, affects 51 million children under five.

There’s a growing awareness that nutrition issues aren’t just about hunger. For example, there’s the growing problem of overweight and obesity, with 42 million children under five overweight and 500 million adults obese.

“Increasingly, there is an awareness that many poor countries are suffering the double burden of undernutrition and a growing obesity problem,” says Arnold. “We need measures to deal with both problems, and not just for the developing countries.”

The situation has improved since 2008, when food price increases provoked riots in 30 countries, and the number of people who were undernourished topped one billion. That crisis, and a realisation the UN agencies weren’t being as effective as they should, led to the creation of the Sun Movement.

The idea is to push nutrition up the agenda, either by specific initiatives such as the encouragement of breastfeeding or the fortification of food, or through broader measures to help small farmers or improve healthcare. The movement is country-led, and involves the private sector and civil society.

“Sun has brought something different, a more broad-based engagement by more actors to tackle the problem.”

One welcome trend in food is the decline in the number of real and threatened famines, thanks to better prevention and early warning mechanisms. “Unless there is a complete political breakdown in a country there is no reason for famine to ever happen again.”

Climate change

Yet the global food situation remains fragile, thanks to factors such as population increase, climate change and growing demand for food in newly emerging economies. “The question we face is how are we going to produce more food from a resource base – land and water – which is constantly shrinking.”

Arnold wants to see agriculture more directly attuned to the needs of tackling undernutrition as part of the campaign to reduce hunger to zero in the coming decades. Some believe new technologies offer the best hope of increasing yields but he is not keen to get into the debate about genetically modified produce, at least for now.

“For the moment it would be wrong to distract ourselves with a big debate on GMOs when so much can be done with existing foods and technologies. But there is no doubt that in the longer term this issue is going to have to come back onto the table.”