The report stressed that in addressing issues of food security and sustainable development in Southern Africa, attention needed to be given to: reducing poverty through rural development as an overall priority goal; increasing socio-economic growth and ensuring equitable distribution of growth; improving health and education of the population; empowering women to actively participate in socio-economic development; ensuring participation of all stakeholders in programmes; and maintaining peace and stability.

The report noted that in some developing countries, population growth contributed to more than 70 per cent to growth in food demand. As the majority of the population in Southern Africa depended on agriculture, population growth would continue to increase population density on agricultural land per household. In some of the counties, arable land was already very limited. Consequently, further pressure from population growth would increase the number of the landless population. The situation was worse where people who were already using marginal lands which required higher production costs - more use of fertilizers which the poor could not afford.

65. Other factors that negatively affected food security and sustainable development in Southern Africa included low status of women; poor health and the impact of HIV/AIDS; poverty; low application of science and technological innovations in agriculture and food production; poor infrastructure; weak extension services, marketing and distribution of inputs; and wars and disasters.

The report urged member States to address these constraints seriously and it proposed specific recommendations. Among these were: implementation of policies to enhance the role and status of women with regard to education, family planning and reproductive health, ownership of land and access to credit facilities; inclusion of women in the policy making process; ensuring that extension and technical services are extended to women producers; prevention of further spread of HIV/AIDS; reducing the levels of poverty by creation of secure gainful employment to the economically active population; ensuring equal access to productive resources; linking socio-economic development sectors so as to enhance the synergies of various policies towards sustainable development; applying affordable technologies and innovations, including irrigation, to assist farmers improve productivity, post-harvest losses, food storage and processing; improving the infrastructure in general to support food production and marketing; and creating a peaceful and stable environment, conducive to food security and sustainable development.

The meeting was thus called upon to urge member States to consider food security and sustainable development as one of the priority goals and take concrete action to ensure that in addressing food security and sustainable development, they take into account all other factors that have both direct and indirect impact on food security and sustainable development.

In the discussions, the Committee underscored the importance of food security as one of the priority goals of socio-economic development, noting especially that poor people were hungry people and the hungry were poor. Thus, food security was not only an issue of agriculture. Job opportunities for employment was part of the issues to be addressed to ensure access to food. Linking various national policies towards common economic and social development goals was underscored as important in the quest towards food security and sustainable development. In this context, the population, environment, development and agriculture (PEDA) model was seen as a useful advocacy tool on the linkages and policy implications for food security.

The Committee appealed to member States in the subregion to work towards formulation of a common position on issues of sustainable development at the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in South Africa in 2002. The Committee, in this regard, appealed to ECA to take the lead in assisting member States for preparation of common African position.

The Committee further stressed that although most countries in the subregion had policies on food security, these policies were not being implemented due to a number of factors including weak capacity for implementation, inadequate resource mobilization to implement these polices as well as weak national commitment. It was in this context that FAO was organizing a World Food Summit in Rome, from 5-9 November, 2001 as follow-up to the 1996 World Summit to stimulate political commitment as well as enhance resource mobilization for effective implementation of programmes and policies. At that meeting member States would be reporting on actions taken to implement the 1996 World Food Summit Plan of Action.

Subregional and regional trade was also underlined as crucial in addressing food security. The Committee noted that WTO had just completed taking stock of the issue for renegotiations on the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA). The Committee stressed the importance of African Countries to actively participate in the WTO negotiations on the AOA starting April 2001.