More than half of the world’s population is adversely
affected by malnutrition according to FAO. Worldwide, 200 million children
suffer from under-nutrition while two billion women and children suffer from
anaemia and other types of nutrition deficiencies.
More than 20 years after the first Conference on Nutrition
(ICN), held in 1992, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva, finally
conceded the need for democracy to tackle the problem. The participation of
non-State actors in ICN2, evidence shows that encouraging participants enables
greater transparency, inclusion and plurality in policy discussion, which leads
to a greater sense of ownership and consensus. As such, the preparation for the
ICN2 was a first step in building alliances between civil society organisations
(CSOs) and social movements involved in
working with food, nutrition, health and agriculture.
Flavio Valente, Secretary-General of FIAN International, an
organisation advocating for the right to adequate food. “It is the first time
that civil society constituencies have worked with FAO, WHO and the Committee
on World Food Security (CFS) to discuss nutrition.” This gave the opportunity
to social movements, “including a vast array of stakeholders such as peasants,
fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, women, pastoralists, landless people and urban
poor to have their voices heard and be able to discuss with NGOs, academics and
nutritionists….This means that governments have already started to listen to
our joint demands and proposals, in particular those related to the governance
of food and nutrition,” he explained. According to Valente, “things are
changing” – civil society organisations have organised around food and
nutrition issues, the food sovereignty movement has grown in resistance since
the 1980s and societies are now demanding action from their governments in an
organised way.
In the heart of the Pijol mountains in the northern Honduran
province of Yoro, the Tolupan indigenous community of Pueblo Nuevo has a lot to
celebrate: famine is no longer a problem for them, and their youngest children
were rescued from the grip of child malnutrition. The Tolupan indigenous people
in Pueblo Nuevo are no longer suffering from the drought that hit much of the
country this year, severely affecting the production of staple crops like beans
and maize, as a result of climate change and the global El Niño weather
phenomenon. For the last two years, the Tolupan of Pueblo Nuevo have had food
reserves that they store in a community warehouse. The “black Junes” are a
thing of the past, the villagers told IPS.
“From June to August, things were always really hard, we
didn’t have enough food, we had to eat roots. It was a time of subsistence, we
always said: black June is on its way,” said the leader of the tribe, 27-year-old
Tomás Cruz, a schoolteacher. “But today we can smile and say: black June is
gone. Now we have food for our children, who had serious malnutrition problems
here .because there wasn’t enough food.”
Pueblo Nuevo’s experience was a success because the tribe
understood that they had to change their way of life, implementing good
practices in cropping, hygiene and food security. The villagers was key to the
community’s transformation. The tribe no longer uses the slash-and-burn
technique to clear the land, and they now use organic fertiliser and recycle
their garbage. They have a community savings fund where they deposit part of
their earnings, which has made it possible to have clean drinking water and
provisions. They managed to improve the yield per hectare of beans from 600 to
1,800 kg, and of maize from 900 to 3,000 kg, and now they know that a family of
six needs 2,400 to 2,800 kg of maize a year, for example. In Pueblo Nuevo they
are also proud that they don’t have to hire themselves out to work, or sell their
livestock to ranchers or merchants in the area to eat. “Now they say they’re
rich because they no longer have to work for a boss,” Sandro Martínez, the
mayor of Victoria, told IPS.
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