STATEMENT OFTHE NATIONAL COORDINATOR OF THE SIERRA LEONE NETWORK ON THE RIGHT TO FOOD (SiLNoRF) ON THE OCCASION THE LAUNCH OF THE 2014 ANNUAL MONITORING REPORT ON THE ADDAX OPERATIONS AND THE LAUNCH OF THE FIRST EDITION OF SiLNoRF`S NEWSLETTER ON THE 26TH JUNE 2014. THE CEREMONY TOOK PLACE AT THE MAKENI CITY COUNCIL Worldwide over 852 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition while at the same there is enough food to feed every human being. Therefore while demand for increased productivity is a very important step it is by no means a sufficient and adequate response. In fact in most cases hunger is a problem of access to available resources. It is linked to marginalisation, discrimination or extreme poverty: small scale farmers are forcibly evicted from their lands, economic exploitation and environmental degradation threaten the livelihoods of indigenous people, to the urban poor, and the physical available food is simply not affordable. The overwhelming majority of the chronically hungry are victims of violations of their right to food. In this situation therefore, a human rights approach to development policies and hunger eradication strategies is needed. A human rights approach identifies those deprived of their human right to food and places them at the centre of political struggle and policy consideration. As human rights give rise to entitlements which shall in turn be regarded as enforceable claims against governments, overcoming hunger and malnutrition can no longer be regarded as a matter of charity, but of social justice and state obligation. Since the World Food Summit of 1996 and with very strong civil society mobilisation a lot of developments on the human rights to food have taken place culminating in the adoption of the voluntary guidelines on the right to adequate food in 2004. The guidelines proposed general strategies of how to overcome hunger and malnutrition and on how to realise the right to adequate food by helping state parties define coherent national programmes necessary for the implementation of the right to food. States are the single most important actors in the progressive realisation of the right to food and according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, state parties have specific responsibility to protect, promote and fulfil this right. In response to these developments, 45 Civil Society Organisations across Africa met in Nairobi in 2007 during the World Social Forum where a broad frame work was agreed upon to take forward the right to food agenda in Africa. In a follow up meeting in Cotonou, Benin in 2008, the African Network on the Right to Food was established with MADAM the focal organisation in Sierra Leone. MADAM therefore established the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to the Right to Food (SILNoRF) as a network of Sierra Leonean Civil Society Organisations with the vision of “a Sierra Leone where every person has sufficient and adequate food and fully claims their right to food” Since then the network has embarked on raising awareness on land and food rights, engagements with stakeholders on these issues and on monitoring the operations of large scale land investments as they impact on peoples’ right to food. SiLNoRF has been monitoring the ADDAX investment since 2011and the publication of the monitoring report is an annual event. SILNORF has raised many issues which threaten peoples´ land and food rights. Some of the most high profile issues are the cases of Manonkoh Village involving flooding of farm lands by London Mining and Mathombo Village, Kunike Sanda Chiefdom in the Tonkolili District involving the Mini Hydro Dam in Makali whose construction has destroyed all the swamp lands of the village and the village itself has been abandoned as the dam lake has engulfed it. SiLNoRF co-organised the first national land conference in Sierra Leone in 2012 and organised the first women’s´ land conference in 2013. The network is the co-founder of the ALLAT. We shall continue our engagement with stakeholders including government officials and traditional leaders, UN agencies and investors with a view to promoting food and land rights. As a key action for this year we shall organise a national conference on the status of the right to food in Sierra Leone as well as a West African Sub- Regional conference on land. We also intend to push the right to food agenda in the ongoing constitutional review process. And this is where we wish to call for the support of the FAO and other civil society organisations. Finally, we recognise the governments´ efforts in allocating 10% of the national budget to the agriculture ministry in fulfilment of the Maputo Accord as a step in the right direction. However, we are very much concerned by the current trend of large scale land deals in a situation where lands governance is extremely weak and policies are obsolete. And this why we welcome the piloting of the on Voluntary guide lines on governance of land tenure, fisheries and forests by the FAO and urge the process to be fully participatory. I thank you all.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 16:01:04 +0000
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