2000. He also proposed a Plan of Action on World Food Security and a World
Food Security Compact, which once again brought him into conflict with the
leading industrialized countries who continued to resist any attempts to establish
multilateral world food security arrangements beyond their control. In the mean-
time, a World Bank perspective on world food security issues was presented in a
seminal study in 1986, which constructively distinguished between transitory and
chronic food security, and called for different policies and programmes in their
solution. Two years later, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
published the results of its ten-year research programme on the costs and benefits
of food subsidies in developing countries, and the policy options that they offered
in providing food security.
and the resolutions, goals and targets they adopted, in the order in which they
occurred on: children, the environment, water resources, nutrition, human rights,
overcoming global hunger, population, social development, food, agriculture and
the environment, women, food security, and agricultural trade. By bringing these
conferences together in one place, and describing their outcomes, the full range
and diversity of the commitments made can more clearly be seen. The series of
conferences ended with the Millennium Summit at the United Nations in 2000
at which world leaders agreed to specific millennium development goals and
targets, which included halving the proportion of the world's population whose
income is less than a $1 a day and who suffered from hunger. The summit was
followed by an International Conference on Financing for Development in 2002,
at which commitments were made to provide the resources necessary to reach the
millennium development goals, and by a World Summit at the United Nations in
2005 at which world leaders reiterated their commitment to achieve the goals set
at the 2000 summit.
policy and in the ebb and flow of the general discussion about development policy,
including: the markedly changing views about agriculture, from the negative to
the positive, in the 1960s; the shift in attention from economic growth to basic
needs in the 1970s; the focus on structural change in the 1980s; the dominance
of poverty and human development concerns of the 1990s; and the emphasis
on reaching agreed millennium development goals since 2000. At the same time,
national and international food systems have evolved markedly with the effects
of increasing commercialization, industrialization, urbanization, and the emer-
gence of the supermarket food economy and expanding world agricultural trade.
A broader concept of world food security has also emerged in the light of these
developments and the series of international conferences held in the 1990s.
obesity in the developed countries as a major killer when many continue to suffer