Mr. Chairman,
Mr. President,
Mr. Director-General,
Under-Secretary-General Petrovsky,
Mr. Barre,
Governors,
Friends,

Congratulations to IFAD!

I am honoured to speak here on the occasion of IFAD’s twentieth anniversary.

Before I begin, I want to pay tribute to President Fawzi Al Sultan. It is a great pleasure to watch him operate, to work closely with him, and to call him a friend. In fact, it is a pleasure for all of us at WFP to work so closely and productively with all of our colleagues at IFAD.

Much emphasis is put on collaboration, so I am pleased today to emphasize the partnership shared by IFAD with the agency I represent, WFP.

The partnership between IFAD and WFP is strong in part because we reach out to the same people -- the unseen poor -- people left behind by traditional, large-scale development projects and loan programs. They live outside the economic and political mainstream; some in remote rural areas where banks are not willing to invest their capital, others in densely packed slums where jobs are few and hunger is their daily companion. We share a clientele that it is easy to neglect -- women, small landholders, the politically powerless.

IFAD and WFP have conducted 43 joint projects with a total value of $1.1 billion. Twenty-six are still ongoing. I am particularly pleased with our work together in the poor mountainous areas of Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces in China, regions that do not attract the scale of investment communities need to struggle out of poverty. In those regions, WFP food aid supports training and building infrastructure, while IFAD provides loans for crop and animal production and income-generating activities for women. Elsewhere in China, together we provide aid to poor farmers, mostly helping women to become more self-sufficient, and we are expanding the use of vulnerability mapping, a tool we find increasingly useful in targeting food aid resources. In fact, our two agencies have reached an agreement with the Government of China to design and carry out all future projects together.

We are looking forward to growing cooperation in North Korea, where the expertise of our colleagues here and at FAO is so desperately needed if that country is to emerge from its food crisis. IFAD’s crop and livestock rehabilitation projects, and FAO’s quick action on barley seed purchase and distribution, and other agricultural inputs are critical to help overcome the underlying structural problems in the agricultural economy, so that we won’t face the need for food aid for years to come.

Hunger and Poverty

The goal of building food security in poor communities, which we three agencies share, is critical to overcoming the hunger and malnutrition that so often passes from one generation to the next. Everyone recognizes that poverty is a cause of hunger, but few see how hunger contributes to the perpetuation of poverty.

Robert Fogel, a nobel laureate in economics, has demonstrated the impact that improved nutrition has on economic growth. He estimates, for example, that almost a third of the growth in per capita income in Britain over the last two-hundred years can be attributed to improved nutrition in the workforce. Study after study in India, Sierra Leone, Brazil and Sri Lanka has shown a clear connection between nutritional status and the productivity and wage earnings of workers.

Ending the generational cycle of hunger passed from mother to child has become a major focus of our work. It is critical in our approach - a more "people-oriented" approach - to help people move on in their lives, to build a sustainable livelihood so that they do not pass their hunger and poverty on to their children.

A sustainable approach to ending the inter-generational cycle of hunger means involving women, involving mothers. Women grow more than 60 percent of the food in Asia and 80 percent in Africa, the only region where projections point to a growth in malnutrition among children in the next two decades. By targeting mothers in particular we hope to end the stunting, the susceptibility to disease, and the intellectual impairment that scars the lives of so many children and condemns them to a life of poverty.

Economic growth will help enormously, as will more agricultural research, better extension services, seeds and fertilizers. But all that is not enough. We need growth with equity and we need growth that is gender blind. Hunger will not be overcome just by growth in GNP or in food production; poor people and poor women in particular must have access to food. We need to invest in people -- in their good nutrition, in their health, in their education -- we need to invest in ways to improve their lives.

One reason we are here today to celebrate IFAD, is because throughout the past two decades, IFAD has been one of the few institutions to fully recognize these facts, as it reached out to small farmers, women, and the rural poor, setting a powerful example with successful efforts throughout the world.

As President Al Sultan described in his address, we have seen close up how this type of work has transformed people’s lives:

A few years ago, we travelled together in rural Bangladesh with our partner JCGP Executive Heads of Agencies. We spoke with women who now had their own businesses and had improved their lives. We saw that these improvements were a direct result of support from IFAD loans, WFP food aid for training, UNICEF health centers, UNFPA family planning advice, and UNDP infrastructure improvements. Woman after woman told us how much better their lives were, and how excited they were about the future for their families and especially their children.

These transformations are possible in the lives of the unseen poor -- the poor that traditional development fails to reach.

On behalf of all of us at WFP, let me offer congratulations to IFAD:

• Congratulations to the members of this Governing Council for your vision in creating and guiding IFAD in its valuable work.
• Congratulations to President Fawzi Al Sultan for your maturity, common sense, and the priority you give to the poorest of the poor and to women.
• Congratulations to all IFAD staff for your remarkable dedication and hard work.
• And most importantly, congratulations to the millions of poor people who have used the tools that IFAD has given them to transform their lives and that of future generations to come.

Thank you.