UN praises Vietnam and Indonesia for effective anti-hunger policies
Updated
Despite decades of effort and vast sums in aid and development financing, this year the number of people without enough to eat has peaked for the first time above one billion, two-thirds of whom live in Asia and the Pacific. Next week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will host a World Summit on Food Security, bringing 60 heads of state together to discuss how to bring the numbers down.
Ahead of that meeting the FAO's carried out a global survey of national policies on fighting hunger, which found that a handful of governments do, in fact, have anti-hunger policies that work. Those countries include Vietnam and Indonesia.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: Barbara Huddleston, former chief of Food Security, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome
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HUDDLESTON: The most important factor in Vietnam is the major change that took place when they decided to adopt an open economy model in 1986, it seems a long time ago but we know that things change significantly in terms of the orientation of the government and the economy. So now they are following much more a capitalist model. They opened up their markets, they invested in commercial agriculture, they invested in improved rice varieties, improved cultivation techniques, and that put them on an economic growth pattern that was very important.
Then with resources that they obtained from this economic growth, they were able to invest in more infrastructure, they had more than 90 per cent of their rural people gain access to roads, schools, health care. Most of them have access to electricity. So through this investment and also they maintained a previous social security system, like unemployment benefits, health care and so forth, that they paid for by their economic growth.
PODGER: Vietnam of course has a centralised government, although it does as you say have a degree of open economy. One of the other nations in this region that's singled out in the report is doing well in terms of policy approach is Indonesia. So what is it getting right?
HUDDLESTON: Based on some pilot work that was supported by FAO and the government of Japan, Indonesia came up with an approach which is called the Village Food Resiliency Program. It's part of their general food security policy that went into effect in 2006, so it's only been in operation now for four years. But what they learned in the pilot phase is that their old extension system, which is a top-down type extension system, wasn't working.
Under the new approach a lot of training was done to change the way of thinking of the agricultural extension workers. So now instead of taking a message out to the farmers' groups, the extension workers facilitate the formation of the farmers' groups, these groups are formed on the basis of synergy or binding factors; things that make the farmers able to work easily with each other, and each group has to come up with a business plan. They have to actually identify the actions they want to take, they have to cost them, they have to figure out how much money they're going to make if they implement these actions, and only after they get a viable business plan do they get access to any kind of subsidised credit or loans or other types of technical assistance.
And then of course the farmers - because they see their success - they feel good about it, and they've expanded this from 250 villages in 2006, to over 1,200 villages that are reached now, and they have a plan to extend this on a much larger basis in the coming five years.
PODGER: The Pathways to Success Report from which these figures and stories of success are drawn, does it present a picture of a model if you like that governments can follow to ensure that as much of their population as possible isn't going hungry?
HUDDLESTON: Yes in fact when we started working on this document we weren't really sure whether or not we were going to discover a model. But the contrary proved to be the case. So what the elements of this model, which of course in detail differ from one country to another, but the elements of the model are first of all, you need to have some kind of open economy that integrates your economy into the global economy, because now we're living in this kind of world. It's really very hard to make progress if you're remaining in a little isolated bubble and not participate in the global market.
And then you have to have policies that really are enabling for private, whether it be private sector farmers or agri-businesses and so forth, they have to feel comfortable with the economic environment so that they invest. Then again as in the case of Vietnam, the economic gains, a part of those gains have to be dedicated to reaching out and investing in rural people and investing in social safety nets in the case that the rural people cannot gain their own livelihoods. And I think Indonesia is a good case that shows us that with relatively small investments you can reach rural smallholder farmers and improve their productivity, improve their incomes and lift them out of poverty and out of food insecurity.
Then the third is in the case that a crisis occurs, and every country is subject to periodic crisis of one kind or another, there have to be mechanisms in place that protect the gains. So countries need institutions that will put emergency response programs into place, they need to put stimulus packages into operation in the case like the economic and financial crisis that we've just been through, and basically keep the engine of the economy running and keep people's ability to maintain their livelihoods protected.
