850 Million People Worldwide Remain Hungry - Diverse Food Culture Essential for Food Security

  It is estimated that some 850 million people worldwide remains hungry at present. The World Food Summit (WFS) held in Egypt in 1996 set a goal to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015. It is said that the WFS goal will only be reached if annual reductions accelerate to 26 million per year. This is more than 12 times the pace achieved to date.

  Each year on 16 October, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) celebrates World Food Day. The theme for World Food Day was “Biodiversity for Food Security�E It highlighted biodiversity’s role in ensuring that people have sustainable access to enough high-quality food to lead active and healthy lives. According to the FAO, to feed a growing population, it will be essential to increase resilience in food production by protecting a wide array of life forms with unique traits, such as plants that survive drought or livestock that reproduce in harsh conditions. Yet people depend on just 14 mammal and bird species for 90 percent of their food supply from animals. It is imperative to diversify the source of food particularly for the prevention of starvation in developing countries.

  The issue of food security is, however, not confined to the question of food quantity. The “State of Food Insecurity in the World 2002�Eissued by the FAO warns against a deficiency in micronutrients such as iron, iodine, and vitamin A as hidden hunger. According to the report, some 840 million people are starving while over 2 billion people world wide suffer from micronutrient mal nutrition. Deficiencies usually occur when the habitual diet lacks diversity and does not include sufficient quantities of the fruits, vegetables, dairy products, meat and fish that are the best sources of many micronutrients. Grave consequences, including continued and sustained loss of productivity, permanent mental disability, blindness, depressed immune system function and increased infant and maternal mortality can result from micronutrient deficiencies. The heaviest toll from these dietary deficiencies is borne disproportionately by women and children. Most micronutrient deficiencies could be eliminated by modifying diets to include a greater diversity of nutrient-rich foods.

Endangered Cattle and a Creeping Mono-cultural Society

  What is clear from the above observation is that the solution to present food insecurity requires the conservation of biodiversity and an increase in food production resilience so that a shortage in certain foods can be made up for by another. Diversity in nutrition is also essential. These can be achieved only with the existence of a diversity in food culture. Environmental movements we see today, however, go diametrically in the opposite direction. Their principal means is ‘prohibition�Eand ’exclusion.�E

  Taking fisheries, for example, they have either excluded or are pushing for exclusion of various fisheries starting with whaling, followed by high seas drift net fisheries, use of shark fins, trawling and tuna longlining regardless of the insufficiency in scientific grounds. The exclusion of industry is combined with the exclusion of culture. These days, anti-whaling organizations have been reinforcing their claim that ‘Whaling is not a Japanese culture.�EOr that ‘Japanese don’t really wish to eat whale meat.�E

  They may probably be aiming at eradication of the industry together with its culture. The exclusion of culture and industry of this sort will lead to the creation of a mono-cultural society. In such a society, environmental pressure concentrates on limited resources and the structure of food production loses resilience. As a matter of fact, such a mono-cultural society is already creeping on us. Cattle are being endangered in the shade of the spot lights CITES sheds on high-profile animals.

  The FAO and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) co-published the 3rd edition of the "World Watch List for Domestic Animal Diversity," 5 December 2000, and said that every week the world loses two breeds of its valuable domestic animal diversity, and that 1,335 breeds of domestic animals out of 6,379 in the FAO Global Databank for Farm Animal Genetic Resources are classified at high risk of loss and are threatened by extinction. The greatest threat to domestic animal diversity is the export of animals from developed to developing countries, which leads to crossbreeding or even the replacement of local breeds. In developing countries, breeds from industrialized countries are still considered as more productive. The often difficult environments in developing countries, however, require particular types of animal genetic resources that are adapted to them. Genetic diversity is an insurance against future challenges and threats such as famine, drought and epidemics. On March 31, 2004, the FAO further confirmed the continuation of this situation.

Exclusion or Coexistence �ETourism of Two Types

  I would like to refer to the relationship between food security and tourism. Many environmental organizations apparently promote ecotourism as a means of excluding the use of wild life. Whale watching is representative and the scenario is to ban whaling without taking the blame for the economic hardship imposed on local communities. The Website of Greenpeace Japan ‘IWC 55 Berlin Briefing�E(1) clarifies its position on whale watching. Greenpeace concludes that a sound whale watching industry and whaling cannot coexist based on the research they made in areas where whale watching is in practice, including Vava’u (a part of Tonga in the South Pacific). For details, the Greenpeace website can be referred to, which suggests their firm commitment to exclude whaling.

  There is a phrase, ‘Banana Republic,�Eindicating Central and South American countries that rely on the exportation of limited products such as bananas and, therefore, suffer from economic instability. Whether the main product is bananas or another, a country with a limited choice of production loses economic resilience and suffers from an unstable economy. I myself have had the experience working for a travel agency in Egypt and during this period the Gulf War broke out. The tourism industry was completely out of business for three or four month. Fortunately, however, Egypt produces oil though not as bountifully as the Gulf States. Passage through the Suez Canal is also another important source of revenue. Egypt has, above all, agriculture handed down since ancient times. This is economic resilience. When a country or a community really wishes to live exclusively on tourism, it is their choice. But when an organization engages itself in the expansion of such an unstable economic structure in developing countries for its religious cause of the “Animal Rights Movement,�Ecan this be regarded as charity? What is in stark contrast to this ‘Tourism for exclusion�Eis ‘Tourism for coexistence and complement.�EAn increasing number of fisheries cooperatives in Japanese villages try to maintain a good relationship with recreational fishing or start up a new recreational business, being unable to run their business with a catch fishery alone due to a decline in catch. As one such example, a diving business run by the fisheries cooperative of Ito-city attracts nation-wide attention. The income from this recreational business was good during the period of the bubble economy although the fishery has been more lucrative in the last several years. The complement of tourism as in this example will give resilience to the fisheries and prevent a vicious circle of an increasing catch when the fishery is not lucrative.

Expectation for the 21st-Century-Type Civil Movement

  The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity was unanimously adopted at the General Conference two months after 9/11. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) also released its Human Development Report 2004 ’Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World�Ein July 2004 and warned against the violation of cultural freedom. Such trends we see these days reflect the global concern over the incessant acts of terrorism and wars even after the turn of the 21st century and the earnest wish of global society for world peace. Some of the environmental organizations are also engaged in the movement for world peace, and I would pray for their success in this field. I question, however, how much radical organizations, like anti-whaling ones, can contribute to world peace while rejecting cultural coexistence and being engaged in the diffusion of misunderstandings, contempt and hatred between different cultures. I expect wide-spread growth in 21st-Century-Type NGOs that respect cultural coexistence and peace as opposed to 20th-Century-Type NGOs that have pushed forward mono-culturalism by means of confrontation and exclusion.

(1) (Japanese only)
http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/campaign/oceans/commercial_whaling/documents/iwc55berlin_whalewhatching.pdf

This article is reprinted from ‘AquaNet�EJanuary 2005 with revision.