New FAO boss must do better

The United Nations’ food agency has picked Brazil’s Jose Graziano da Silva as its director general, the first new leader in almost two decades. His challenge is to improve the FAO’s performance on food security as the world faces near-record food prices that are driving millions into poverty.

Graziano da Silva (pictured above), 61, former Brazilian minister of food security will take over at the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization from Jan. 1 to July 31, 2015, replacing Senegal- born Jacques Diouf after 18 years at the head of the biggest UN agency.

 

Graziano da Silva was in charge of former Brazilian president Luiz Inacia Lula da Silva’s “Zero Hunger” plan started in 2003. The plan reduced hunger in Brazil by half and cut the percentage of Brazilians living in extreme poverty to 4.8 percent in 2009 from 12 percent in 2003, according to the FAO, which awarded Lula the 2011 World Food Prize for “Zero Hunger.”

The FAO, set up in 1945 as a specialized UN agency, says it leads international efforts to defeat hunger and helps developing countries improve farming. The mandate of the agency, whose headquarters moved to Rome from Washington in 1951, includes raising nutrition levels and agricultural productivity.

Millions have starved in the developing world since 1945 with parts of Africa ravaged by famine. Food price shocks are becoming more common, not less, and the Green Revolution never got going in Africa, partly because of ‘structural adjustment’ policies overseen by the FAO that starved agriculture of resources and gave rise to the welfare trap many poor nations now face – no agricultural base and forced to accept food aid, mainly from US farmers who depend on the government-funded food aid market.