Peter Power (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)

I am pleased to have this opportunity to join Members in the Seanad for this debate on the Hunger Task Force report. It comes at a particularly difficult and turbulent time on the international scene. This House has debated long and hard, well into the night and early morning, the crisis in the international financial sector, and Members have been bombarded and lobbied in regard to intricate and exotic financial matters. However, there is another crisis facing the world at present, namely, the hunger crisis. There is one voice Members did not hear, the voice of the 862 million people on this planet who will go to bed hungry tonight. These are the silent, hungry millions who populate our world. Today, in this Chamber, we have an opportunity to listen to their voice and hear their concerns.

I thank the members of the task force, particularly its chairman, our former Oireachtas colleague, Mr. Joe Walsh, for a very clear, concise and focused report. It gives a voice to the hungry and articulates in an urgent tone what needs to be done to put an end to hunger once and for all in this world of plenty, and provides pointers for what Ireland could do to help to achieve this.

The genesis of the report was the White Paper on Irish Aid which was published two years ago, a seminal document which charted the way forward for the Irish Aid programme in the medium to long term. One of the key recommendations of that White Paper was to establish a Hunger Task Force to examine the particular contribution Ireland can make to tackling the root causes of food insecurity, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. It was particularly timely that Ireland as a nation took this initiative before the food security crisis developed throughout the world in the past 12 to 18 months, when basic staple foods and foodstuffs became extremely expensive and inaccessible to hundreds of million of people. That Ireland already had this process in train, and had the foresight to bring some of the world's top experts together to analyse the issue and ascertain how Ireland could contribute towards resolving this truly difficult problem, is a matter of which we can all be justly proud.

On foot of the recommendation to set up the task force, a 15-member group was established under the chairmanship of Mr. Joe Walsh and composed of prominent national and international experts, including Ms Josette Sheeran, the director of the World Food Programme, and Mr. Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser on food issues to the UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon. The task force commissioned research and analysis of the issues involved, and held a number of meetings in Ireland, in both Dublin and Cork, as well as a field visit and meeting in Malawi. I understand the Malawi visit was particularly rewarding as it gave the task force the opportunity to interact directly with officials and civil society representatives of a country which has had some success in recent years in battling a situation of persistent chronic food insecurity.

That success is a point I would like to highlight. I had the opportunity of visiting Malawi in July to see a country which had faced a food security crisis and serious food shortages for 5 million people a few short years ago. Through very proactive measures, which have been successful and which we have studied and brought into the report, that figure of 5 million going hungry each day has been reduced to approximately 500,000, and perhaps provides a template as to how we can proceed.

This report details the deep-seated challenges we face in ridding the world of hunger. However, at the same time it also highlights a series of success stories to show how we can win this war on hunger. Others have done so. We just need to decide that this is our priority and that we are determined to win this battle. The case studies are available in the report. Some of them like China, Vietnam and Brazil are well known, but others are less well known, especially two cases in sub-Saharan Africa including Ghana and Malawi. Ghana has halved the number of undernourished by increasing agricultural productivity through the application of successful agricultural research coupled with improved public sector services to agriculture. In two years Malawi has almost trebled production of its staple food crop, maize, from 1.2 million tonnes in 2005 to 3.4 million tonnes in 2007. The key to that was the provision of subsidised fertiliser and seed to smallholder farmers, which massively increased their productivity and helped them to get away from subsistence farming. These examples show that the problem can be tackled, that we need to put our minds and political will to the task and decide that it is a priority and we are going to solve it.

The report covers a range of issues involved in the complex task of overcoming and ending hunger. I wish to focus on two issues, namely, gender and nutrition. It is fair to say that in Ireland when we think of a farmer, we think of a man. However, a farmer in sub-Saharan Africa is most likely to be a woman. In sub-Saharan Africa women are responsible for 80% of food production. That simple fact has major implications for how we should approach the task of increasing smallholder production in Africa — one of the three main approaches recommended in the report. The African smallholder has a multiplicity of roles — farmer, mother, and home maker. The demands on her time are insatiable. She may well be undernourished, at risk of, or suffering from HIV-AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis or a myriad of other ever-present health threats. To increase smallholder productivity we must factor in that very difficult and challenging reality. Our programmes must not treat smallholders as some kind of unit of production. They are human beings with a range of needs and our programmes must be broad enough to encompass the full range of needs including health, welfare and the welfare of children.

The other element I wish to highlight is under-nutrition. This is the silent and least visible thread running through global hunger. Maternal under-nutrition is prevalent in both sub-Saharan Africa and in south Asia. The report shows that such under-nutrition can run through the generations with an undernourished mother giving birth to an undernourished infant. A child that has inherited under-nutrition from the womb is at a severe disadvantage from birth. Unless we can get proper nutrition services to such a child he or she will in turn grow up undernourished and will pass on that low nutrition status to the next generation, and so on through the generations. Research shows that we must intervene with such children in their first two years of life. If we do not, then it is likely they will suffer irreversible damage to their future physical and mental development.

Anyone present who has children will know how difficult it would be to see a child growing up undernourished in its early years, consigned to a life a misery, and physical and mental retardation. Such lives are lives lost. Already, 50% of children in east Africa and 42% of children in central Africa are stunted — a clear symptom of chronic malnutrition where children are much smaller than they should be for their age. At a global level, 10% of all children are wasted — a clear symptom of acute malnutrition where they are grossly underweight and may be in need of therapeutic intervention. Yet, as the report points out, nutrition is frequently an institutional orphan — falling between the responsibilities of Ministries of health, agriculture, women's affairs, education or whatever else. The report rightly characterises nutrition as "the partial responsibility of many — but the main responsibility of none". I very much welcome the spotlight that the report has placed on the nutrition and the need to break the cycle of under-nutrition.

I also very much welcome the findings of the report and I agree with its analysis of hunger. The analysis is well-informed and was carried out by eminent people with expertise and high standing nationally and internationally. I welcome also the overall thrust of the report. I support fully its recommendations that we focus on three key elements, namely, to prioritise the abolition of hunger in our development policy and in our broader foreign policy and to follow through on commitments made, to target smallholder agricultural productivity, and to promote effective actions to counter maternal and infant under-nutrition.

The report will influence the future direction of development policy and of broader foreign policy. On foot of the report's recommendations I will establish within Irish Aid a special unit on food security that will be tasked with advancing our work to address hunger. The recommendations are both detailed and focused. The first task of the unit will be to carry out a full analysis of the recommendations, and of the extent to which current programming by Irish Aid responds to the many facets of hunger. The House has previously discussed the millennium development goals. The primary goal is the right to life and the right to feed everyone on the planet. Unless we fulfil that commitment, all of the other goals are meaningless. Once that exercise has been completed, we will be in a position to plan how we can best pursue the recommendations with a view to making a real and lasting contribution to the abolition of hunger from the world.

Development aid is often described in percentages and comparative volumes of money relative to what other countries contribute. Ireland has shown that one can contribute in many different ways. We can bring our genius and ingenuity to the world stage. The chairman, Joe Walsh, and members of the hunger task force brought the report to the Secretary General of the United Nations. The report was presented to the UN in the presence of such luminaries as Bono and Mr. Geldof who have worked tirelessly in this area. We have shown that we can bring added value by using our own ingenuity and initiative to produce a report that has application not just in Ireland but in many other countries. I was proud to bring the report to the attention of European development ministers at last week's meeting. I invited them to examine the report to see whether they could apply it to their aid programmes. That shows we can bring our influence to bear to tackle this most intractable problem.