Day 3, 18 Nov

Everyone’s loosened up at FAO today as the summit winds down. Very few people in the media centre at 9. And we can all mix in the atrium area. Since none of the G8 leaders have come and mostly sent junior people some are at the end of the line making speeches this morning while the round table discusses small farmers.

FAO’s DG, Jacques Diouf, had a press conference at the end where he declared "to my regret the official Declaration adopted by the Summit this past Monday contains neither measurable targets nor specific deadlines which would have made it easier to monitor implementation..." (see full release below); while La Via Campesina ‘The blatant absence of the heads of states of the G8 countries in the World Food Summit, held in Rome from 16 to 18th of November was one of the key causes of the total failure of this summit. There were no concrete measures taken to eradicate hunger, to stop food speculation or to stop the expansion of agrofuels. (See full release below.)

More or less as soon as The summit press conference ended the formal FAO Conference began – that the place where governments to the business that will decide, for example if the new Committee on Food Security will have enough staff and funding to do the job that’s just agreed to in the declaration. Before that though the UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food , Olivier de Shutter, gave the 26th McDougall Memorial lecture (pdf), having early made a short statement at the summit. He challenged the delegates to rethink how they saw agricultural development, to take a more agro-ecological approach and tackle speculation and squeezing of small farmers.

Tomorrow final interviews and then time to go home and make some sense of all this….

Geoff Tansey

Step Forward to Hunger Free World - FAO

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