While delivering the keynote address at the Partners in Agriculture Global Food Security Symposium in Tokyo, Japan on Wednesday, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack urged the global community to embrace a more sustainable and self-sufficient food production approach to address issues of food insecurity in the growing world population.As Vilsack stated, "in the longer term, we need a comprehensive approach focused on developing sustainable solutions to eliminate food insecurity. Our goals should be to increase the availability of food by helping people and countries produce what they need, to make food accessible to those who need it, and to teach people to use it properly so that they make the most of it ..."
Vilsack noted that food security is moral issue, stating "We should all feel a humanitarian imperative to take on the challenge and ensure that children do not go to sleep hungry." The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in 2009 over 1 billion people in the world were chronically hungry.
The secretary did acknowledge that international food aid will always be needed to solve short-term problems, but over the long-term there must be a shift to helping the neediest countries develop agricultural resources so they can provide for themselves. For Vilsack, this means empowering farmers at the local level in impoverished countries to find out their ideas for developing the agricultural sector of their economies and how other nation's can help.
The symposium was sponsored by the US Grains Council and the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service
To read excerpts from the secretary's remarks in a USDA news release, click here.
To see more on the Global Food Security Symposium, click here.
To read the Farm Future's story on the symposium, click here.
Posted: 04/08/10
