Welcome to the United Nations
Addressee: Member States, United Nations agencies, Burkina Faso, Mali and the Niger, FAO, IFAD and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Full Text
The Permanent Forum encourages Member States, in cooperation with United Nations agencies, to develop social policies that will enhance the production of indigenous peoples’ traditional foods and promote the restoration or recovery of lost drought-resistant indigenous food varieties to ensure food security. In this context, the Forum recommends that Burkina Faso, Mali and the Niger, as well as United Nations agencies such as FAO, IFAD and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, establish a committee, in full consultation with and with the participation of indigenous peoples, aimed at preventing food crises in the sub Saharan region where indigenous peoples reside. The committee’s objective should be to prevent humanitarian disasters and, in particular, to prevent starvation at the same level as the disaster that struck the region in 1973.
Responses
• FAO organized a meeting in February 2015, entitled Indigenous Food Systems, Agroecology and the Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure, with indigenous representatives from the seven socio-cultural regions. Four Permanent Forum members were present at the meeting. The suggestions emerging from the meeting link to the PFII’s recommendation, including national programs targeting food insecurity and malnutrition in indigenous communities, capacity building through FAO and addressing the issue of marginalization in the implementation of FAO’s policy. With respect to the research and promotion of indigenous peoples’ foods and seed varieties, FAO emphasizes the multidisciplinary working group managed by FAO, which is working on food composition of several indigenous foods. • There has been no major progress on the second part of the recommendation concerning the establishment of a consultative committee with indigenous pastoralists of the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger), for early warning systems. FAO is however working in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in relief and humanitarian activities along with the rest of the UN system and actively participated in the Food Security cluster, which is co-chaired by WFP and FAO.
Final Report of UNPFII Session 14 (2015)
Area of Work
