Peter Power (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)

I propose to take Questions Nos. 8, 22, 50 and 60 together.

The report of the Hunger Task Force, which was commissioned by the Government last year, was submitted on 25 September at the recent UN Millennium Summit in New York. The Hunger Task Force was established before the current global food price crisis hit the headlines and was informed by our knowledge gained on the ground, through our overseas aid programme, Irish Aid.

I pay tribute to our former colleague Joe Walsh who did a magnificent job in chairing this group of national and international experts. I thank each member of the task force for their commitment and dedication in producing this report. The report has been circulated to all members of the Oireachtas and copies placed in the Library. The report is concise, focused and accessible, and provides a clear picture of what must be the greatest scandal of the world today, the fact that notwithstanding all the global technical development and innovation, in 2008 there are more than 862 million people who do not have enough to eat. That number is constantly rising, driven by the recent escalation in the global price of food.

The report of the task force is both timely and welcome and I have no difficulty in endorsing its overall findings that we focus our attention and efforts on three areas: to follow through on commitments made both nationally and internationally by all Governments, both donors and Governments of developing countries and to increase the priority given to hunger in the aid programme; to target smallholder agricultural productivity; and to promote effective actions to counter maternal and infant under-nutrition. To follow through on this, I am establishing a new section which, inter alia, will have a special dedicated focus on food security tasked with advancing our work on addressing hunger.

Hunger is a complex issue and the task force has made detailed recommendations. Our first task will be to carry out a careful analysis of the recommendations and the extent to which current aid programming is responding to the many facets of hunger. Once that exercise has been completed we will be in a position to plan how we can strengthen our efforts to address the root causes of hunger, with a view to making a real and lasting contribution to the abolition of hunger from our world.

Two recommendations of the task force have been raised. The first is that a target of 20% be set for aid spending on hunger by 2012. In response to this, I assure Deputies that different aspects of food security are funded across a range of programmes within Irish Aid. We must assess in full our current degree of engagement with hunger across the entire range of our programmes. When the results of our assessment are available, we will be in a better position to determine how best to move forward with regard to volume and quality.

The second is that a special envoy be appointed to ensure that the recommendations are implemented. This recommendation will be examined closely and I agree that donors and governments should be held to account on their commitments. However, we must reflect and assess whether the appointment of an envoy would be the most effective way to do this. We must be sure that such a step will bring added value in these challenging times.

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