Rome FAO Summit

Hundreds of farmers, fisher folks pastoralists and activists from environmental groups and other civil society organisations are gathering in Rome (May 30 - June 5) for a parallel initiative to the FAO Conference on food security and global warming to ask governments and the FAO to take up their responsibilities in today's food emergency.
At the World Food Summit in 1996, when there were an estimated 830 million hungry people, governments pledged to halve the number by 2015. Many now predict that the number will instead increase by 50% to 1.2 billion, further threatened by unpredictable climate chaos and the additional pressures of agrofuel production.
In the midst of collapsing farm and fish stocks, skyrocketing food and fuel prices, new policies, practices and structures are required to resolve the current food emergency and to prevent future -and greater - tragedies. Governments, including those in the global South, and intergovernmental organisations must now recognize their part in implementing policies that have undermined the agricultural sector and destroyed food sovereignty.
Industrialized countries and the industrialization of agriculture are the biggest sources of global warming gases, but it is farmers, fisher folks and rural communities - and especially small farmers and rural communities  in developing countries - that are among the first to suffer from climate change.
The organisations gathering in Rome are strongly committed to defend people's rights to eat and to feed themselves in a sustainable way. They reject  industrial agriculture and genetic engineering and defend food sovereignty ans sustainable family farming and food production as the solution to the current environmental, social and economic crisis.