Region | Lebanon
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 5
Gulf News reporter Abbas Al Lawati is attending a workshop in Geneva entitled Beyond Wars, Building Peace which is organised by the Swiss press agency InfoSud and the Media21 journalist's network in coordination with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
- By Abbas Al Lawati, Staff Reporter
- Published: 14:32 April 7, 2008
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 3
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 3
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 4
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 4
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 1
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 1
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 2
Gulf News reporter blogs from a trip on how to rebuild peace after a war
Gulf News reporter Abbas Al Lawati is attending a workshop in Geneva entitled Beyond Wars, Building Peace which is organised by the Swiss press agency InfoSud and the Media21 journalist's network in coordination with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
Following a five day workshop, Abbas and eleven other reporters from around the world will go on a five day field trip to Lebanon to witness the reconstruction efforts after the war with Israel last year.
April 5, 2008
Food as a human right?
A child below the age of ten dies of hunger every five seconds. Jean Zeigler, UN rapporteur for Right to Food, very undiplomatically calls this an assassination and a massacre that can be prevented by the international community.
The World Trade Organisation and the European Union, he says, use Africa as an agricultural “dumping ground''. The $349 billion dollars that the EU gives in agricultural subsidies means that an African can buy European produce for a fraction of the price of local produce, virtually killing the local industry. This, in turn, forces more and more Africans to buy food instead of producing it. As they would naturally buy the cheapest available, the cycle of dependence would continue.
Thirty-six African countries, he points out, rely primarily on agriculture.
While recognising the need to move away from the use of fossil fuels for energy, Zeigler blasts the world's growing reliance on sources of biofuels, such as corn, which is increasingly being farmed for fuel instead of agriculture, thus reducing its global supply. (The US, for example, is expected to produce 144 billion litres of bioethanol in 2008, according to Zeigler).
The reduced supply would not only lead to a shortage of food but also drive up food prices globally, which would affect the poor the most.
Zeigler proposes putting a moratorium on biofuel production for five years until technology to create fuel from waste advances, and for states to recognise access to food as a human right. Both proposals, he says, are regularly shot down by the industrialised states, especially the United States, which argues that food is a civil right, not a human right, and that free markets can take care of the situation.
Zeigler rubbishes the claims. “The idea that the market can absorb hunger, epidemics and illiteracy has been proven wrong,'' he says.
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