Roma – The former extraordinary minister for Food Safety and Hunger Alleviation of the government of former president Lula, from 2003 to 2004, José Graziano da Silva, is the new director of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Election of the head of the organisation took place on Sunday (26) in the Italian capital, at the FAO offices, on the second day of the organisation’s conference. The series of meetings ends on July 2.
The Brazilian candidate won 92 votes out of the 180 countries present – of a total of 191 nations that are members of the FAO. Graziano competed against another five candidates. The former Brazilian minister will be in office from January 2012 to July 2015. This is the first time a Brazilian is elected to head the organisation.
According to Milton Rondó Filho, general coordinator of International Actions for Hunger Alleviation, the nomination of Graziano will be an opportunity to further expand Brazilian cooperation abroad.
Graziano will replace the Senegalese Jacques Diouf, who has been in the post since 1994. Diouf was elected for three terms running, for six years each term. The first director general of the organisation was the British John Boyd Orr, elected in 1945.
Among the challenges to be faced by Graziano at the FAO is the fostering of greater production of food without degrading the environment, a fundamental question for developed nations, mainly the Europeans. The new director should also take into consideration the rapid growth of the world population. In 2050, there should be around nine billion people all over the planet to be fed.
Campaign
In recent months, the Brazilian campaign for election of Graziano had been gaining strength. The minister of Foreign Relations, Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, came to the Italian capital twice for meetings at the FAO offices, for example, to discuss the matter.
Last Friday (24), at a seminar with another two ministers of state of Brazil – Wagner Rossi, of Agriculture, and Afonso Florence, of Agrarian Development -, in Rome, Brazil gave another sign of Graziano’s having true chances of being elected, leaving behind almost certain winners like the Spanish Miguel Moratinos. The African countries that are Brazilian partners in agricultural projects, like Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Rwanda, for example, were present.
Nomination
José Graziano’s name as a candidate for the FAO was released early this year by president Dilma Rousseff. At the time, the former minister was operating at the FAO as a regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. The basis for Graziano’s nomination was the Zero Hunger program established in 2001 and implemented as from 2003, when Graziano was the Food Safety and Hunger Alleviation minister in the first term of office of president Lula.
According to the former minister, up to now, the Zero Hunger has removed around 30 million people from poverty. According to Graziano, the program is very simple and has no magic. “It is an operation that must be thought locally, generating a virtuous cycle, providing incentives to production, with programs for generation and transfer of income, but also creating a local consumer market for the produce,” he said on Friday (24).
Graziano sustains that the secret of the Zero Hunger, for example, was to take to Brazilian public schools the foods produced by farmers who were part of the program. “We strengthened these local ties,” said the former minister. Another fundamental point, according to Graziano, was simultaneous promotion of the program in all regions of the country, in an attempt to avoid the movement of people, creating the o well-known and dramatic rural exodus, one of the reasons for the creation of pockets of poverty in the largest Brazilian cities.
*Translated by Mark Ament