FAO’s new Director General won’t have an easy job, but still “we have hope”, says Francisco Caporal. Since FAO’s mandate is “to achieve food security for all and ensure that people have regular access to good quality food”, it would be great to see if José Graziano da Silva has read the reports of his future colleague at the UN, Olivier De Schutter, who recommends a profound shift in agricultural policies in order to ensure food security worldwide.
These opening words, and the complete poem written in 1942 by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, could well have been written after the recent election of José Graziano da Silva as FAO’s Director-General. Drummond’s hero José felt weak and powerless in a particularly hostile situation. Sixty years later, an even more difficult context makes us also think of another Brazilian, who held the same position at FAO between 1952 and 1956: Josué de Castro. The author of “The geography of hunger” artfully described, back in 1946, the direct relationship between large-scale industries, an economic model designed for exporting raw materials, and the hunger and hopelessness shown by Drummond de Andrade.
A new version of Josué de Castro’s work would surely come in handy to FAO’s new José. More than ever, food is the object of greed of a few. While millions face hunger, food has become a market good (seen as a set of commodities), and “citizens” have become “consumers”. Profits determine the production and distribution of food and ethical concerns are left behind. The world’s hunger crisis is exacerbated by persistent increases in food prices, something that FAO itself expects to continue. And as if this is not enough, different forces stimulate the production of non-food crops, driving farming ever-further into an industrial process maintained artificially, and in an unsustainable way, by agrochemicals and public subsidies.
Since FAO’s mandate is “to achieve food security for all and ensure that people have regular access to good quality food”, we hope that José Graziano’s leadership will lead to a change in the dominant agricultural models. This is surely the greatest challenge facing our José. We therefore hope he has read the reports of his future colleague at the UN, Olivier De Schutter, who recommends a profound shift in agricultural policies in order to ensure food security worldwide, and of the IAASTD (the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development), in which hundreds of scientists recommend major changes in order to stop the degradation of the environment and to produce more (and more healthy) food.
José Graziano da Silva’s job will not be easy. Still, we have hope. Graziano da Silva inspired a whole generation with his sharp criticism of the “painful modernisation” process, so we hope his work will support the structural changes needed to acknowledge the current and potential role of smallscale farmers and to reduce hunger in the world. We only recommend him to invite all civil society organisations to join him, especially those representing and working with family farmers, and jointly build a robust transition programme. This will ensure a democratic path towards social and environment sustainability, and towards a reduction in hunger.
Text: Francisco Roberto Caporal
Francisco Roberto Caporal, lectures at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Brazil. He is also President of the Brazilian Association of Agroecology.