Unless the right to food is placed at the very centre of the efforts of international community to address the structural causes which have led to the global food crisis, we risk repeating our past mistakes, an international expert on social, economic and trade rights has warned.

“We may succeed in producing more out of fear of producing too little, but we may omit to address the inequities in the current food systems, and to ensure that the poor have decent incomes that allow them to have access to adequate food,” Dr Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, told the Majlis of General Shaikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, last night.

In a lecture titled: “The Debate on How to Address Global Hunger: From Challenges to Solutions”, Dr Schutter said: “Scenario of the decreased agricultural production is bleak ... the world must have the ability to feed itself.” He stressed that food production must be increased 60 per cent by 2030 to meet the growing demand in the world.

He explained the broad trends of supply and demand of food commodities at global levels, the ecological dimension, dwindling resources and climate change, reinvesting in agriculture and the role of global governance and the right to food.

The lecture was attended by Shaikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, National Security Advisor; Lt-General Shaikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior; Shaikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Chief of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince’s Court; Shaikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research; and a number of Shaikhs, senior officials and diplomats.

“The challenge that we are facing today is unprecedented. We must feed a growing population that, because it is more urbanised, is shifting towards more animal protein-rich diets.

Climate change and the degradation of land increase the competition for natural resources, and shall reduce the surface of land available for agricultural production. At the same time, however, a focus exclusively on the tensions between supply and demand at the global level may lead to an incomplete diagnosis and prescription of wrong solutions.

“The UN Millennium Development Goals aim to reduce world’s hungry population from 20 to 10 per cent and achieve food security to them but the percentage stayed somewhere at 16 per cnet. Sub-Saharan in Africa, South Asia and Yemen are the most hit by hunger today.”

Over the past fifty years, he added, increases in agricultural productivity have consistently outstripped increases in demand for agricultural products, and the calory availability per capita has improved significantly as a result. And yet, we have almost one person in seven globally, mostly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan, that are unable to feed themselves decently.

“We must therefore not only produce more, we must produce better, in ways that are environmentally sustainable and socially equitable, and we must do with a view to reducing rural poverty and to meeting the needs of the urban and rural poor at the same time.”He believed that a combined formula of green revolution and agro-ecology may provide a solution to the food crisis, urging government to support small-scale farmers to play their role in solving the problem.