FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Defend and Protect Poor People’s Right to food

An urgent structural shift in the global economic food system is needed to stem the effects of the growing global food crisis, according to the members of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) alliance meeting in Bangkok earlier this week.

Courtesy Action Aid International

GCAP Asia members call on their governments and international financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank to immediately:

•    Monitor prices in a transparent and accountable way
•    Increase food distribution to vulnerable communities, particularly to pregnant women, small children and sick people.
•    Increase public investment in food production and agriculture, ensuring land rights, credit and technical support for small-hold women farmers.
•    Re-think the global fuel supply and need for energy sustainability, whilst in the meantime ensuring food for people has priority over food for cars.
•    Overhaul the current system of unequal global trade, ensuring that developing countries can invest in their own agriculture and small enterprises, protecting them from dumping.
•    End to subsidies for export products from Western countries.

Longer term, GCAP continues to call for an overhaul of current international trade and economic mechanisms, with an emphasis on gender justice, strengthened cooperatives and local associations, and sustainable agro-industrial development. In the longer term, action to reduce the impact of climate change on developing-country food production is also a necessity.

"In the developed world, rich people spend a tiny fraction of their income on food compared to those in developing countries," notes Amitabh Behar, NCAS, Wada Na Todo. "In South Asia, many people were already spending 60-70% of their monthly income on food – and that was before the price hikes. How can they survive now?"

“Our collective right to food has been undermined and is rapidly forcing people into destitution. Too little is being done too slowly to stop a potentially disastrous situation undermining years of progress across Asia, preventing us attaining the Millennium Development Goals and destabilizing the political environment as well.” remarked Nur Amalia from GCAP Indonesia.

This week, civil society representatives met officials in Kyoto ahead of July’s Japanese G8 Summit to ensure the issues behind the food crisis are on the agenda, alongside climate change, aid and health, and that the voices of millions of Asians are carried to the G8 decision makers.

“The magnitude of the food crisis is being echoed by GCAP in Africa and Latin America so we call on the G8  to fulfill their aid commitments once and for all and to take a longer term structural approach to guarantee food for all.” said Irfan Mufti, GCAP Campaign Manager

The Global Call to Action against Poverty, with coalitions in over 100 rich and poor countries, simultaneously campaigns for domestic accountability across the developing world.

For further information or to book an interview contact:
Ciara O’Sullivan, Media Coordinator, GCAP, ciara.osullivan@civicus.org
Cell: + 34 679 594 809

Notes to Editors:
GCAP Asia representatives in Bangkok came from the following countries
Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Singapore
 

The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is the world’s largest civil society alliance of social movements, International NGOs, trade unions, community groups, women’s organizations, faith and youth groups, local associations and campaigners working together across more than 100 national coalitions/platforms.   GCAP is calling for action from the world’s leaders to meet their promises to end poverty and inequality. In particular, GCAP demands solutions that address the issues of; public accountability, just governance and the fulfilment of human rights; trade justice; more and better aid; debt cancellation and gender equality and women’s rights.

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