-->Mustaqim Adamrah, The Jakarta Post,
Jakarta | Sat, 03/19/2011 2:18 PM | World
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Industry Minister M.S. Hidayat lobbied a number of African
countries Friday to back Indonesia’s candidacy for the top post at
the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“The
industry ministry invited African ambassadors to a dinner to
introduce me to them and to gain support from African nations,”
Indroyono Susilo, the Indonesian candidate for FAO director general,
told The Jakarta Post. He said Indonesia had the support of
other ASEAN countries.
As the only candidate from Southeast
Asia, Indroyono, who is also secretary to the coordinating public
welfare minister, said Indonesia had extensive fisheries, forestry
and natural disaster management systems that the country could
contribute to the world organization.
He said it was important
to integrate and connect food producing areas to areas that lacked
foodand it was also important for developing countries to have
their own standards and codification system on food they produced but
not let them become new non-tariff barriers.
Indonesia, a
member of FAO since 1949, received an FAO award for achieving rice
self sufficiency in 1985. If Indroyono is elected, he would be the
first Indonesian to head one of the UN’s top bodies.
An FAO
conference in Rome in July will appoint a new director general for
the period from Jan. 1, 2012, to July 31, 2015.
Food observer
and economist Bustanul Arifin said an Indonesian candidate was suited
to head the FAO as the country successfully mitigated the impact of
the 2008 food crisis by focusing on domestic rice stock production
and management.
“Indonesia can be a leader in international
and regional cooperation for food reserves, starting from ASEAN+3
[China, Japan and South Korea],” he told the Post via text
message.
The head of the national strategic studies division
at the Indonesian Farmers’ Union (SPI), Achmad Ya’kub, said while
he doubted Indroyono’s capability in leading the FAO, an Indonesian
candidate was perfectly suited for the role.
“From what I
know, Indroyono’s background is engineering, not agriculture. I’ve
never heard of his contributions to Indonesian agricultural,” he
told the Post.
“I’m not sure he well understands that we
have 13 million small-scale farmers with a maximum
300
square meters of land each at a time when food security is
promoted to the advantage of big corporations.”
Ya’kub
said that to attain food security, what mattered was the availability
of food, not who the producer or distributor was.
He added
farmers, large and small alike, had been traditionally producing and
distributing agricultural crops and food on their own.
Ya’kub
cited a 2009-2010 FAO study that showed more than 1
billion people were starving, a large increase from the 825
million people in 1996, underlining the failure of the food security
concept.
Candidates for FAO director general
Austria:
Franz Fischler
Brazil: José Graziano da Silva
Indonesia:
Indroyono Susilo
Iran: Mohammad Saeid Noori Naeini
Iraq: Abdul
Latif Rashid
Spain: Miguel Ángel Moratinos Cuyaubé
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization (www.fao.org)
sumber http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/03/19/ri-lobbies-african-nations-top-fao-post.html</span>
