The theme of the 22nd annual World Food Day Teleconference was “Reflections on Fighting Hunger: Roads Not Taken; Goals Not Met;
2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which was established on October 16, 1945, just before the UN itself. The groundwork for FAO was made by representatives of the allied nations at a meeting in Virginia in 1943 at the lowest point in the Second World War.
The program looked back at what has transpired during the last 60 years of humankind’s ceaseless pursuit of a world free of hunger and looked forward to the steps the world can take, must take, to end the suffering of so many of the world’s citizens. Over the past six decades the world watched agonizing images of hunger and poverty, even as its citizens witnessed extraordinary scientific advancements. We saw the development of many multinational organizations – the World Bank and FAO – to name a few, while hundreds of non-governmental organizations around the world were providing important policy alternatives. Yet more than 800 million people have remained chronically undernourished. Frances Moore Lappé, a leading food activist, and several other international experts discussed these contrasting pictures. The host for the discussion was Daniel Zwerdling, award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio.
PROGRAM DISCUSSION
Following a brief film overview of the history of FAO and its mission the moderator, Daniel Zwerdling, welcomed the special guest Frances Moore Lappé saying “it’s so great to have you with us. So how do we describe you? You are a legend in your own time. You are a best-selling author -- Diet for a Small Planet, which you wrote in 1971, a book which has sold more than 3 million copies – and what’s so extraordinary about those sales figures is that this was not some racy novel; this was a very sober, troubling book about hunger.
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During the third hour of the teleconference program questions were taken from the audience at different teleconference sites.
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Download the Executive Summary of the 2005 teleconference as a PDF (140KB). To read this file you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, available for free from the Adobe website.
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