Dear Friends,

As 2011 approaches its end, I would like to send all of you my best wishes for peaceful and reinvigorating holidays, close to your family and friends.

©FAO/Erick-Christian Ahounou

2012 lies only a few days away, and with that, the many challenges we will face together. As I have said before, I am confident that with a joint effort, we will make significant strides in the fight against hunger, ensuring that the right to food, perhaps the most basic of all human rights, is a reality for everyone.

This entails offering immediate assistance to the most needy, and at the same time, taking the necessary measures to allow them to fend for themselves in the future; promoting sustainable agricultural production and consumption models, looking after our natural resources as well as ensuring access to safe and nutritious food to everyone.

It entails putting the whole strength of FAO behind the vision it was founded upon in 1946.

I look forward to working together with all of you – Member States, staff members, development partners – to make this happen as of January 1, 2012, when I take office as FAO’s next Director-General. As I have said before: “I will not be able to do anything except what we can do together”.

Kind regards,

José Graziano da Silva

“[The election] is the recognition of the excellent results we have achieved in the fight against hunger in Brazil”, said former President Lula, that could not attend the ceremony held on December 12, 2011, because of the medical treatment for cancer he is being submitted to.

In 2003, Graziano da Silva was chosen by President Lula to head the newly created Special Ministry for Food Security and the Fight Against Hunger and to implement the Zero Hunger programme, responsible for putting hunger and poverty as the top priority of the government.

Graziano da Silva led the design of the Zero Hunger Programme, a collective effort in which over 100 people participated in, and that was a result of the Citizenship Caravans. During these caravans, that took place between 1993 and 2001, Graziano da Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and a few others travelled over 90 thousand kilometres to see first hand the problems that Brazilians were facing to be able to propose ways to move forward.

Graziano da Silva’s willingness to take his academic knowledge to the field and transform it into public policies at the service of the needy, was one of his traits highlighted by Professor Antonio Cesar Ortega, that introduced him at the ceremony.

From Spain, the Director of the Advanced Social Studies Institute of Andalucia, Eduardo Moyano Estrada, also sent his message.

This past week, Graziano da Silva also met with the High Level Expert Panel of the Committee of Food Security, and was honoured with Special Sessions of the House of Representatives of Brazil and of the State of Sao Paulo, attended by representatives of the government, congressmen, civil society and the private sector.

“We know that hunger is a social phenomenon”, said Federal Representative Assis do Couto during the session held at the Brazilian Congress. “We must find new says to fight inequality and social injustice”, he added, speaking of the challenges the world faces.

Graziano da Silva will spend Christmas with his family in Brazil before taking up office on January 1, 2012. “I look forward to working together with FAO Member States, staff members and external partners to overcome hunger and promote sustainable agriculture”, said the Director-General Elect.

©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

“Giving emphasis to South-South Cooperation does not mean that we will turn our back on North-South Cooperation. Far from it! Making progress on the fight against hunger demands the fullest possible sharing of knowledge and experience between all nations. We are talking about a fundamental challenge affecting all of humanity and I see it as a collective responsibility of all nations – South and North,” said the Director-General Elect last Friday (9) in Rome.

Graziano da Silva underlined some principles that, in his opinion, should guide South-South Cooperation: each country has something to learn from another; the basis for expanded South-South Cooperation must be a genuine sense of solidarity and sharing between countries and individuals; it must usually be demand-driven; there must be flexibility in the ways in which South-South Cooperation is conducted; and, lastly, it needs to be managed in ways that maximize the use of scarce resources.

Graziano da Silva added that FAO’s comparative advantage in South-South cooperation includes its long experience in technical cooperation, its network of country-level representations throughout the developing world as well as the capacity to serve as an intermediary in negotiating tripartite agreements between its member governments.

The Director-General Elect also proposed two inter-related steps to be discussed with FAO’s South-South Cooperation partners. First, ask FAO’s Technical Cooperation Department to prepare guidelines on a new approach for the management of South-South Cooperation activities in the Organization, in line with the principles that he outlined and learning from the valuable experiences shared at the Expo. Second, arrange for informal and operational meetings between all major current South-South Cooperation donors and their partner countries to explore new ways of strengthening and improving South-South Cooperation activities in FAO, taking into account their views on how each partnership can be made more effective.

©Alessandra Pierdomenico

Renewing the focus on the fight against hunger; rebuilding trust with member states through an open and constructive relationship; concluding FAO’s reform; building a leaner and more efficient FAO to promote sustainable agriculture and food security; and reinforcing a bottom-up approach to planning and budget to assure that country needs receive adequate response were among the issues touched upon by Graziano da Silva in his speech to the Council.

He started by recalling the five pillars on which he campaigned for FAO and noted the convergence between the views and priorities that all candidates presented and that are also shared by Member States.

“We have a common vision for the Organization’s future, inspired by the goals for which it was originally created. Now the time has come to begin our work together”, said Graziano da Silva.

Graziano da Silva proposed a special focus at the national and global levels to regain lost ground in the fight against hunger. Globally, he defended the need for a more effective global governance system for food security, with an active participation of all stakeholders and a strengthened Committee on World Food Security.

At the national level, he committed to scaling up support available to the low-income and food deficit countries, especially those facing protracted crises, cutting across the traditional divide between emergency and development.

“I intend to create teams that draw together the Organization’s skills in policy advice, investment planning, resource mobilization, emergency response and sustainable development. I will also take steps to deepen our collaboration at country level with other UN agencies, development partners, regional organizations and civil society already working in these countries. I look also to strengthen links with private sector enterprises that share our goals, as well as to mobilize additional support through South-South Cooperation”, he said.

Following the statement by the Director-General Elect, 45 delegates took the floor and spoke on behalf of countries or groups of countries representing all the regions that belong to FAO. They expressed support for the entire content of the speech, including the 5 pillars of his platform, manifested their will to work together with the new administration, welcomed Graziano da Silva’s call for all countries to participate in this new FAO and praised the openness, transparency and consultative approach he proposed.

“Rebuilding trust must be based on the recognition that we – the Member Countries and the Secretariat – have shared goals and complementary responsibilities, as clearly established in our Constitution. Trust requires that we work together with total transparency,” Graziano da Silva emphasized.

The Director-General Elect also praised FAO’s staff as the organization’s “most valuable asset” and added that “Management and staff must work together in a more collegiate and integrated manner to improve FAO’s performance at all levels.”

During his statement, Graziano da Silva also reaffirmed his support to the reform of the Organization and his commitment to bring the reform to a satisfactory end so that the Organization can put its “full effort into better delivering and responding to the challenges we face”.

He compared the ongoing cost of FAO reform to the cash for work programmes the Organization is promoting as part of its emergency response in Somalia. Investments in these programmes should reach US$30 million in 2011 benefitting 130 thousand households, while the reform is expected to cost almost US$90 million in financial resources alone between 2009 and 2013.

Finally, Graziano da Silva thanked the incumbent Director-General Jacques Diouf, who steps down at the end of the year. Graziano da Silva recalled the support received when he was preparing to launch the Zero Hunger Programme in December 2002 and acknowledged the “invaluable contribution he [Jacques Diouf] has given during the past 18 years to the cause of food security, positioning the fight against hunger at the top of the global agenda”.

Giulio Napolitano

The Director-General elect of the Organization, who takes up office in January 2012, noted that, in recent years, Latin American and Caribbean countries have placed increasing emphasis on the fight against hunger and extreme poverty to tackle the crisis the world is going through.

“The regional uniqueness is precisely to have found answers that make social inclusion a new motor of growth,” said Graziano da Silva.

Graziano da Silva recalled the launch of the Hunger-Free Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative, supported by FAO, that transformed the region in the first one in the world to commit itself to the eradication of hunger by 2025. With a similar purpose, FAO also supported the creation of the Parliamentary Front against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, half of the countries in the region have a legal framework or are working on laws that promote food security and the right to food.

He also pointed out that the Regional Office has contributed to the creation of a wide range of initiatives to strengthen food security at the country and regional level. Among them are the incentives to the participation of civil society in the debate on rural development and food security, the recovery of traditional food staples in the regional diet, an emphasis on issues such as rural territorial development and rural labour markets, as well as increasing support to small-scale farming.

“Small-scale farming is part of the solution to overcoming hunger and promoting development in Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said.

“Finding ways to link local food production and consumption is one of the most important aspirations of today’s development policies”, added Graziano da Silva, giving as an example the local purchases of small-scale farming food products for use in school meal programmes.

To support the strengthening of agriculture and the fight against hunger, the Regional Office mobilized new resources for projects on food security, transboundary diseases and emergency responses, bringing aboard new donors such as New Zealand and Brazil.

Graziano da Silva added that this was not an isolated effort, but that FAO has been working closer with other regional and international organizations to achieve the goal of guaranteeing that development is fairer and more inclusive.

“Latin America and Caribbean countries are making an effort to reconcile the macroeconomics of growth with the imperative of social justice, in a learning process that can also be useful on a global scale,” concluded Graziano da Silva.

“The Brazilian experience shows the benefits of the active participation of civil society in building effective food security policies and seeing that they are applied consistently,” said Graziano da Silva.

Since being re-launched in 2003, the National Food and Nutrition Security Council of Brazil (CONSEA), has been instrumental in implementing the country’s food security policy. The Council consists mainly of civil society representatives and plays an important role in the design of laws and in the social monitoring of programmes, and it gives political legitimacy to actions that have helped reduce poverty and hunger in the country.

Over two thousand people attended the Conference. Amongst the participants were 180 international delegates representing about 50 countries, including members of the regional Parliamentary Front against Hunger, supported by the Hunger-Free Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative.

“The best way to ensure a victory in the fight against hunger is to embody the concept of the human right to food in law, ideally in a country’s constitution” said Graziano da Silva, highlighting the role that members of parliament play in this process. .

In an Opinion-Editorial published by Tierramerica/IPS on the occasion of the Conference, Graziano da Silva noted that this effort to incorporate different actors in the fight against hunger also occurs worldwide and can help overcome the economic crisis.

“The world crisis requires rapid responses capable of reviving demand and broadly agreed proposals for action to transform the current financial chaos into a cycle of expansion without compromising social justice. The fight against hunger could be one of the pillars of such a program,” wrote Graziano da Silva.

©FAO/Tatiana Vargas

“The solutions to increasingly complex problems such as those we face today require a multidisciplinary approach and a joint effort between institutions,” said Graziano da Silva at the Meeting of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas, held in October in San Jose, Costa Rica.

In a speech at the meeting organized by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Graziano da Silva explained that strengthening cooperation with other international and regional organizations was a way to improve the support provided to countries and advance towards the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty.

In recent years, as FAO Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, Graziano da Silva has pushed for increased cooperation with other agencies.

Examples of this include the document “Outlook for Agriculture and Rural Development of the Americas“, produced by FAO, IICA and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In 2011, the same three agencies co-organized sub-regional dialogues on food prices and volatility.

With ECLAC and the regional office of the International Labour Organization (ILO), FAO also prepares studies to support policy recommendations in order to make agricultural markets more effective in reducing rural poverty.

At the ministerial meeting, Graziano da Silva also thanked the support he received from the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in the FAO election. ”My election was a collective effort in which all of you played a decisive role,” he said.

“I rely on your support to advance towards the eradication of hunger, the promotion of sustainable food production and consumption model and the development of a more efficient global food security governance system”, he said.

Graziano da Silva also advocated for increased investment in agriculture and food security in the world.

“I am certain that an emphasis on food security and agricultural development can bring together governments, civil society and private initiative to promote sustainable, inclusive and fair development,” he concluded.

©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

“The eradication of hunger is too big of a challenge for a single country or institution acting alone. I look forward to working together with governments, you, the CFS, the private sector and civil society organizations to advance in the promotion of the right to food,” said Graziano da Silva.

Olaniran was elected during the 37th Session of the CFS, held in October in Rome, Italy, for a two-year term.

Commenting on the results of the session, Graziano da Silva noted the coincidences between the recommendations of the CFS and his own proposals to fight hunger such as investing in small-scale farming and in local markets, recovering traditional food staples, empowering women, promoting greater transparency in international market and strengthening social protection nets, among others.

“There is a growing consensus on many of the proposals that are being discussed and that we need to work together to eradicate hunger and extreme poverty,” said the Director-General elect of FAO, who also thanked the previous chair of the CFS, Noel de Luna, for his leadership in the Committee.

©Olivier Asselin

He also highlighted the benefits of boosting cash flows into economically stagnant rural communities. “Cash transfers and cash-for-work programmes work in the same way as rain on dry soil, allowing these communities to bloom once again,” said Graziano da Silva.

Read the full article here:

Hungry for food and for stability

José Graziano da Silva

Rarely has World Food Day been celebrated amidst so much uncertainty. The highest levels of food price volatility seen in recent decades and the speed in which price fluctuations are occurring threaten both producers and consumers.

Following a path similar to those of other traded commodities, the FAO International Food Price Index has varied sharply since 2006, when a rise in prices led to a then record high in mid-2008. The index plummeted in the second semester of that year, but in 2009 resumed an upward movement that accelerated in 2010. It now seems to have reached a new but higher plateau.

When prices bounce up and down so often over a short period of time, it is very difficult for farmers to make the right decisions. If the signals aren’t clear, they either sow too much or invest too little.

Price volatility also hurts consumers, especially the poorest people who spend most of their money on food. Millions more families can be thrown into hunger, be exposed to sickness, unemployment, forced into debt and in taking children out of school, making it very difficult to return to a normal self-reliant life, even if food prices fall.

Today, in spite of the fact that enough food is produced for everyone to eat adequately, about one in seven persons in the world suffers from hunger because they cannot afford to buy the food they need for a healthy life.

The 2011 edition of the “State of the Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI)” argues that boosting investment in agriculture and food security, especially in poor and developing countries, is needed to ensure the well-being of billions of people in an environment of continued high and volatile prices.

Since the early 80′s the share of agriculture in official development assistance has dropped sharply, falling from 17% to about 5%. This decline has been mirrored in a similar fall in investments in agriculture and rural development by the governments of poor and developing countries.

If food prices remain high and less volatile, this will stimulate investment in agriculture. While the bulk of the resources will come from the private sector, this follows its own profit-seeking logic and its priority is not to end hunger. So, governments must also invest in expanding the supply of public goods, especially in rural areas in which there is a high concentration of food insecurity and poverty.

Public investment is needed, for instance, in agricultural research and extension, to enable small-scale farmers to take up new technologies adapted to their situations. There is also a big need for financing of rural infrastructure, such as safe water supplies and sanitation, roads, health services and schools, so that the people who supply our food can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.

Governments, however, need to complement support for agriculture and rural development with strengthening social protection programmes, aimed at ensuring that poor families can, at the very least, meet their basic food needs. These not only increase the resilience of vulnerable families to the impact of price volatility and other shocks, but, by translating their unmet food requirements into demand, stimulate local markets and production.

In rural areas, where there is hunger we usually find economically stagnant communities. They are like the dry vegetation of a parched field. Cash transfers and cash-for-work programmes work in the same way as rain on dry soil, allowing these communities to bloom.

The cycle of planting, harvesting and consuming is what spins the economic wheels of millions of small communities throughout the planet. At a national scale, expanded support for these processes – through credit, technical assistance, guaranteed markets for small-scale producers and better infrastructure, combined with social protection – will not only reduce hunger but also spur broad-based economic and social development.

The financial, economic and food crises that continue to destabilize our shared world call for new responses that bring together governments, civil society, the private sector and international institutions in a massive combined effort to ensure that, at the very least, nobody need ever again suffer from hunger. Without hunger, our world will be a happier and safer home for all its people.

©Caroline Thomas

“For agriculture, we cannot start with one-size-fits-all,” Graziano said during a roundtable discussion hosted by US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

The event also featured the ministers of agriculture from Ghana, Kwesi Ahwoi; from Mozambique, José Pacheco; and Jumanne Maghembe, from Tanzania; and was part of the World Food Prize Foundation’s annual Borlaug Dialogue. This year, the World Food Prize was awarder to the formers President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and of Ghana, John Kufuor.

Greening the Green Revolution

“We are in Borlaug’s house, and the Green Revolution has much to do in Africa and in many countries around the world,” said Graziano da Silva. He stressed, however, the need to green the green revolution, cautioning against increased dependence on chemicals, especially fertilizer, as well as over-reliance on mechanization.

The Director-General elect advocated for greater South-South Cooperation and knowledge exchange between and within Latin America and Africa to promote sustainable agricultural production.

“In Argentina, 90 percent of the corn and soybean production comes from areas with no tillage. This kind of knowledge needs to be shared,” he said, adding that Africa was the new agricultural frontier of the world.

Graziano da Silva also recalled that Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, was developed based on a concept of “tropicalization” of agricultural technologies, taking the seeds, machinery and practices in Northern countries and adapting them to tropical areas. Today, it develops crop varieties adapted to a range of tropical sub-climates and is sharing this experience with other developing countries.

Adapting technology to local conditions, rather than “reinventing the wheel” is crucial, Graziano da Silva said, adding that deep local capacity was needed.

New model of cooperation

He stressed the need to avoid in South-South Cooperation the traditional vision of international cooperation, of having countries that are donors and others that are recipients. “Cooperation is a process that both can learn from, especially in agriculture.”