ISLAMABAD: Oxfam Pakistan, along with Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP), government officials and the National Agricultural Research Centre (NARC), celebrated World Food Day to raise awareness about food insecurity, migration and agricultural developments in Pakistan.
This year’s theme on the World Food Day was, “Change the future of migration. Invest in food security and rural development.” It merits mention here that rising inequality across the world had been impacting the poor in terms of their access to healthy and nutritious food. Due to this, many poor families were forced to migrate to earn more in order to feed themselves and their dependents.
On the occasion, the National Food Security and Research Minister Sikandar Hayat Khan Bosan said that, “The government of Pakistan is celebrating World Food Day in collaboration with United Nations (UN) agencies and other development partners to reiterate our commitment to the global concern of ensuring food security.”
The event was attended by diplomats, ministers, government officials, civil society members and representatives of UN agencies and development organisations.
Speaking on the occasion, Oxfam Programme Director Javeria Afzal said that, “The planet produces enough to feed everyone, however, the unequal access to resources compels the poor to migrate. This World Food Day we have a chance to make this right. Three-quarters of the extreme poor base their livelihoods on agriculture or other rural activities. Women are key to food production with 72.7 percent of women engaged in agriculture. Creating conditions that allow rural people to have more resilient livelihoods is a crucial component of any plan to tackle the migration challenge. At the very least, farmers in Pakistan should have the power to access the resources they need to fight poverty and hunger.”
Informational stalls were also setup at the venue for participants to learn more about the work being done by Oxfam, WFP, FAO and different government bodies regarding climate change, migration, rural development and food security.
Participants at the event were informed by speakers that a large share of migrants came from rural areas where more than 75 percent of the world’s poor and food insecure resided and depended on agriculture and natural resource-based livelihoods. A quarter of global refugees resided in only three countries (Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon), it was further informed.
Experts urged all countries, particularly the developed ones, to invest more in small-scale agriculture, especially in regard to women who played a vital role in ensuring food security.
In the end, speakers and participants decided that agriculture needed to be rebuilt along entirely different lines and poor farmers and countries should be made central to that change. It was also decided that world hunger could not be controlled by rural agricultural produce only and urban centres had to play its role to ensure that everyone had food on their table.
