Albania – The Address of President Topi at the FAO Summit

TIRANA, Nov 17 – President Bamir Topi took part at the FAO summit held in nearby Italy.
Topi called on the countries world wide to have wide consensus and intensification of concrete actions to prevent the causes and consequences of extreme poverty and hunger of one billion people who suffer from chronic hunger in the Sub-Sahara Africa, Asia and Pacific, in Latin America and Caribbean, in North Africa and Near East and elsewhere.
The tragedy of hunger and malnutrition is a difficult battle that requires huge efforts and contributions, because the greater they are, especially those of developed countries, the quicker the improvement of the governance of world food systems will be in order to meet the target of the World Food Summit 1996 in Rome, going as far as to save from the hunger claws more than 425 million people as it was projected until the year 2015.
Topi said the countries should “prove that the right to security for a safe food size with enough feeding values should be something that is gradually tangible, seen and touched by the grand armada of one billion hungry and malnutrition people in the world.”
He urged governments to increase public and private investments in agriculture and in rural infrastructure so it can be developed faster.
Topi said that “food safety remains above all a national responsibility upon which Albania has based its strategy and plans addressing the challenges of food safety in order for every mother and child to enjoy the right of food safety of necessary food values and also its preparations to make the needed amendments to ease the negative effect of climate change.”
He also urged removing taxes from the food exports and some other barriers that limit the food supply, thus to prevent the monopolies and others from dictating market prices. He said, “Ƴuch a measure would ensure the reduction of poverty, the increase in supplying population groups with little income and their alienation from organized crime activities.”
“We are all conscious that we cannot be satisfied with what we have done in the past or what we have accomplished up to now, but we must try harder in order to change the future of the people suffering from hunger and malnutrition, because change is a law of life that requires the change of our actions in the near and distant future.”