World Food Summit: Five Years Later
Remarks by
Antonio Maria Costa
Executive Director, UN ODCCP, Vienna
Under-Secretary General
Rome, 11 June, 2002
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Poverty and hunger are at the heart of the World Food Summit agenda. Drugs and crime are at the heart of my Offices mandate. Is there a link between them? No, certainly not, in the sense that hunger or poverty can never justify criminal activity. No, even in the sense that crime is more likely in conditions of underdevelopment: this correlation is factually incorrect. However, we cannot deny that individuals and communities that are excluded from, or are left at the margin of development processes, become easy prey of criminal enterprises. They become victims of drugs lords and their evil trade; they become captive to organized crime and terrorists; they become unfortunate objects of traffickers in human beings.
For these reasons, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UN.ODCCP) pursues the twin objectives of reducing the demand for narcotic crops and the eradication of their production in an innovative way. The Office gives the highest priority to ways and means to offer legal alternatives, namely sustainable means of livelihood to rural communities otherwise dependent on drugs money.
Several questions are usually raised at this point: are there examples of illicit cultivation eliminated successfully? The answer is strongly on the positive: yes, a large number of countries (for example Iran, Pakistan, Bolivia, Peru, Thailand, Guatemala, Lebanon, India) were able to launch long-lasting programs to eliminate illicit cultivation.
Is this switch into legal activity sustainable?, one could then ask. The answer is again in the positive, especially in the countries where the government is committed to exercise a healthy control over the process. This first condition of good and effective governance is necessary, but not sufficient. Something else is needed, something related to this Summit agenda: economic reliance on narcotic cultivation can only be removed when different income-generating options are made available. I would like to stress to the participants of the Summit this notion of Alternative Development.
The UN.ODCCP has launched important Alternative Development projects to enhance food production in formerly drug producing countries in Latin America, Middle East, Southwest and Southeast Asia.
In implementing these projects the Office worked closely with FAO and other UN agencies, benefiting greatly from their technical expertise. These projects have enabled farmer families to develop over time the legal economy, through diversification of crops and sale of licit products. Greater food supply has resulted, together with improved public health, in better education and environmental rehabilitation.
There have been some impressive success stories.
In Bolivia, together with FAO, we have introduced since 1997 state-of-the-art sustainable rural management systems for thousands of families, promoting a wide range of food crops and cash harvests. As a result, during the past few years Bolivia managed to reduce its stock of illicit coca by nearly 90 percent, something few observers believed was possible in a country where barely ten years ago the income from the drugs industry accounted for nearly 10 percent of GDP. Similar successes have been achieved in Pakistan, Thailand, Laos to name just a few.
These examples do not only make us partners in development. They prove the importance of sequencing correctly the activities of development agencies, counting on the expertise and comparative advantage of each. At a time when the code words of development administrators are "coordination" and "mainstreaming", the message which is imparted by the cases reported above is far reaching. The message to development agencies is to integrate their efforts in order to respond to the evolving needs of assisted countries. The Vienna-based UN.ODCCP, while pursuing its effort to help countries graduate out of drugs cultures and into sustainable development, welcomes other institutions commitment to pursue development processes from this point of graduation onward.
I am especially addressing the donor community. I would like to invite the authorities gathered here to be generous in assisting countries that persist in the Alternative Development approach to natural resources management. The reduction of illicit crops is a costly and complex process. It is also short lived -- unless something else happens. In order to succeed, rural communities need to participate in decision making, require adequate means for farming and deserve open export markets.
We face a gigantic challenge. With commitment and resources, the challenge can be turned into a win-win situation: we can win the fight against hunger and poverty by fighting, at the same time, drugs and crime.
The situation in Central Asia today is another important example. Todays Afghanistan illustrates the extent to which the lack of economic alternatives, is forcing local people to resort to drugs cultivation. We all know that over time Afghanistan has become the source of 70% of the worlds production of opium: an illegal activity, fought quite forcefully by the new Interim Administration (AIA). Why such heavy dependence on illicit crops in Afghanistan? For several reasons. Because of the lack of seeds, equipment and irrigation facilities, and because of lack of export markets for licit crops. Furthermore, during more than two decades of war, despair and destruction, practically the only money available to Afghan farmers has come from drug traffickers. They have provided the credit needed before the planting season, repaid with opium after the harvest.
In Afghanistan, the lack of credit can be remedied rapidly: indeed, we are now working hard at developing innovative micro-banking facilities. But the structural changes needed to switch to Alternative Development are by far more difficult. We are confident that Afghanistan will eventually graduate out of illegal cultivation, like other countries did in the region and especially in Latin America. Everybodys commitment and resources will be required.
I thank you all for your attention.