A summary report from the Mexico Action Summit

Participants at the Mexico Action Summit explored how increased food production to feed the rural poor can be made compatible with natural resource management and biodiversity stewardship. Participants also examined how international trade and domestic subsidy policies can be reformed to make sustainable development possible.The meeting provided an action plan for cooperation between business, governments, multilateral institutions and civil society from developing and developed countries, calling the G8 and other leaders to act now to address hunger and poverty while protecting and restoring the world’s natural environment for future generations.Conclusions and moving forward. Participants agreed on:the need for G8 leaders to act now to decisively address hunger and poverty and to protect and restore the world’s natural environment for future generationsthe need for the MDGs to be the framework that unites all public and private actionthe realistic possibility of achieving MDGs by 2015the importance of these actions for achieving the elimination of poverty and hunger in compatibility with the protection and restoration of the earth’s natural assetsthe need for new approaches to working together in the policy arena and in the scale-up of ecologically responsible and socially productive agriculture, with the aim of promoting linkages between agriculture, biodiversity and poverty eliminationthe need to restore agriculture as the priority sector in national and international public policiesthe need to eliminate subsidies on agricultural products and to adequately value and promote healthy ecological systems that provide the basis for agricultural production and a well-nourished populationa threepronged approach to be undertaken at the community scale: to increase agricultural productivity, make rural and national markets work for the poor, and improve schoolchildren’s nutritionParticipants proposed additions, including: reference to HIV/AIDS and to the role of womenspecific mention of the Cancun WTO conference and the effects of dumpingemphasis on the multisectorial approach, including NGOs and the private sector; stress on the importance of science and technologya call to bring together the discourses on economic growth, science and biotechnology and agro-ecologyreference to a six-year timeline for subsidy removalstress on the need to strengthen national and international research systemsreference to PPPan element on restoring agriculture as the engine of economic growth while giving priority to the rural space as a wholea note that agriculture and environment should be seen as global public goods