It is a fact of life that most of the food insecure people in the world are rural people and rely on farm and non-farm employment and income, which depend in one way or another on agriculture. Historically, very few countries have experienced economic growth and poverty reduction without agricultural growth, either preceding or accompanying it. Per caput food production fell similarly. FAO believes that most of these countries have the potential to reverse the trends and develop their agricultural sector. How to ensure that the on-going process of globalisation makes a positive contribution to realising and strengthening the domestic agricultural productive capacity of these countries is the key challenge facing us today.
Globalization is a complex process and has many components.
Over the past five years, the LDCs themselves, along with many other developing countries, made considerable progress in understanding these complex Agreements and their consequences for their agricultural sector. I am pleased to state that FAO collaborated with many of these countries in this important task. As a result, our understanding of the Agreements and their consequences have improved considerably, as proven by the large number of proposals that the developing countries made in the process of the preparation for the 3rd WTO Ministerial Conference at Seattle. In this context, I should also recall the statement made at that Conference by His Excellency Tofail Ahmed, Minister for Commerce and Industry of Bangladesh, on behalf of the LDC Group, which contained a number of valuable proposals. Drawing from these and our own analyses, I wish to make a few remarks on how the regulatory framework can contribute to assisting the LDCs in their agriculture and trade.