Biodiversity Key To Ending Poverty, Hunger, U.N. Meeting Told

Biodiversity Key To Ending Poverty, Hunger, U.N. Meeting Told
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

"Biodiversity has an important role to play in fulfilling people's nutritional needs," the report's authors wrote. Examples of highly nutritious crops include millet in India, Nepal's indigenous Bayarni rice, pulses and legumes in Kenya and sorghum in Ethiopia (Sean Yoong, Associated Press, Feb. 10).

High-level U.N. officials played up the link between biodiversity and poverty eradication yesterday as the Seventh Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity opened.

"The protection and conservation of nature is the chance of survival for the poor," said U.N. Environment Program Executive Director Klaus Toepfer. "Biodiversity conservation must combine with poverty-eradication strategies, otherwise it won't work."

Convention on Biological Diversity Executive Secretary Hamdallah Zedan also said biodiversity must be at the forefront of poverty eradication.

Many biodiversity-rich regions are located in developing countries where hunger is an issue, and the 10-year-old convention has just six years left to reach its target of significantly reducing biodiversity loss by 2010 (New Straits Times I, Feb. 10).

Canadian scientist David Suzuki yesterday derided the 2010 goal as "ridiculous" but urged governments to change their ways.

"It is a grand statement of arrogance to say that we know and can manage biodiversity," Suzuki said. " The only thing we can truly manage is ourselves."

Suzuki went on to say that governments need to cultivate "the humility to realize how ignorant and how utterly dependent we are on nature" and stop making nature "pay for economic development" (New Straits Times II, Feb. 10).

Yesterday Toepfer said the "global development agenda" set by wealthy countries was responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of plant and animal species (U.N. Wire, Feb. 9).

The biannual conference, which gathers 2,000 officials and scientists to discuss implementation of the convention to stop biodiversity loss, is an outgrowth of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It lasts until Feb. 20 (Yoong, AP).