She is also an experienced lawyer and diplomat. A former founding legal advisor at the Turkish Ministry of Environment, she was previously appointed to the United Nations Environment Program's chair in environmental diplomacy at the University of Malta.
The problem with industrial agricultureHinting at the future direction of her research and policy recommendations, Elver criticized the vast subsidies going to large agribusiness companies. Currently, in the European Union about 80 percent of subsidies and 90 percent of research funding go to support conventional industrial agriculture.
"Empirical and scientific evidence shows that small farmers feed the world," said Elver. "According to the U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO), 70 percent of food we consume globally comes from small farmers." She continued:
This is critical for future agricultural policies. Currently, most subsidies go to large agribusiness. This must change. Governments must support small farmers. As rural people are migrating increasingly to cities, this is generating huge problems.
If these trends continue, by 2050, 75 percent of the entire human population will live in urban areas. We must reverse these trends by providing new possibilities and incentives to small farmers, especially for young people in rural areas.
"We are being far too kind to industrialized agriculture."
If implemented, Elver's suggestions would represent a major shift in current government food policies.
But Marcel Beukeboom, a Dutch civil servant specializing in food and nutrition at the Ministry of Trade & Development who spoke after Elver, dissented from Elver's emphasis on small farms:
While I agree that we must do more to empower small farmers, the fact is that the big monocultural farms are simply not going to disappear. We have to therefore find ways to make the practices of industrial agribusiness more effective, and this means working in partnership with the private sector, small and large.
An initiative on agroecology?The new U.N. food rapporteur's debut speech coincided with a landmark two-day International Symposium on Agroecology for Food and Nutrition Security in Rome, hosted by the FAO. More than 50 experts participated in the symposium, including scientists, the private sector, government officials, and civil society leaders.
A high-level roundtable at the close of the symposium included the agricultural ministers of France, Algeria, Costa Rica, Japan, Brazil and the European Union agricultural commissioner.
FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said:
Agroecology continues to grow, both in science and in policies. It is an approach that will help to address the challenge of ending hunger and malnutrition in all its forms, in the context of the climate change adaptation needed.
Agroecology is a traditional way of using farming methods that are less resource oriented, and which work in harmony with society.
A letter to the FAO signed by nearly 70 international food scientists congratulated the U.N. agency for convening the agroecology symposium and called for a "U.N. system-wide initiative on agroecology as the central strategy for addressing climate change and building resilience in the face of water crises."
The scientists described agroecology as "a well-grounded science, a set of time-tested agronomic practices and, when embedded in sound socio-political institutions, the most promising pathway for achieving sustainable food production."
More than just a scienceA signatory to the letter, Mindi Schneider, assistant professor of Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, said:
Agroecology is more than just a science, it's also a social movement for justice that recognizes and respects the right of communities of farmers to decide what they grow and how they grow it.
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