Published: March 07, 2006
Brazil Hosts U.N. Conference on Agrarian Reform in Latin America
By Eric Green, Washington File 
March conference seeks to develop strategies for helping region's rural poor
The city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, is hosting a March 7-10 international conference, sponsored by the United Nations, on agrarian reform in Latin America, aimed at lifting millions of people out of what the international organization describes as "grinding poverty."
The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said March 1 that the conference seeks to establish new development opportunities in Latin America's rural areas that would offer an escape from hunger by providing "more equitable access to basic land and water resources."
Almost 64 percent of the rural population in Latin America and the Caribbean live below the poverty line, and over the last 20 years the number of poor people in rural areas has increased, according to the United Nations.
Organizers of the Porto Alegre event say some of the world's poorest people are landless farmers who need help from the global community to be lifted out of poverty. The conference seeks to bring momentum to meeting one of the U.N. Millennium Goals: to reduce by one-half the number of the world's hungry people by a target date of 2015.
The Millennium Goals are a set of eight targets that were established at a 2000 U.N. summit aimed at reducing major global ills - such as poverty, illiteracy and hunger - by 2015.
The FAO said the conference in Porto Alegre should "foster alliances between governments, small farmers' organizations, international institutions, donors and civil society as a means of assisting the world's poorest people to gain better access to basic productive resources."
Scheduled conference participants include FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, who has urged Latin American nations to become active in identifying options and opportunities to reduce poverty and hunger in the region's rural areas.
The meeting will examine how policies have improved resource access for Latin America's poorest people; how to improve local natural resource planning and management capabilities; how to identify new development opportunities; and how to combine agrarian reform, social justice and sustainable development into helping the poor.
Additional information about the Porto Alegre conference is available on the conference's Web site.
U.S.-Backed Program Seeks to Bolster Sustainable Agriculture
The United States in 2004 launched an international agricultural science and technology fellows program to help lift developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere out of poverty.
The program is intended to strengthen sustainable agricultural practices in Latin America by providing short-term scientific training and collaborative research opportunities in the United States to visiting researchers, policymakers and university faculty.
For example, 10 agricultural scientists from Central America came to the United States in August 2005 for more than a month's training in techniques to increase agricultural production. (See related article.)
The fellowship program, named for Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in cooperation with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Borlaug is called the "the father of the Green Revolution" for his success in developing high-yielding wheat varieties and reversing severe food shortages in India and Pakistan in the 1960s.
More information about the Borlaug program is available on the USDA Web site.
Source: U.S. Department of State
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