Mountain people still marginalized and malnourished.

Mountains are crucial to life. Hosting more bio-diversity than any other eco-region on earth, mountains also provide most of the worlds fresh water. More than 3 billion people rely on mountains for water to drink and grow food, produce electricity and sustain industries. However, policies concerning the management of those resources are made often from afar, leaving mountain communities with very little influence and power.

Although mountain people represent about 12 per cent of the global population, their communities carry a much larger portion of the burden, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). A disproportionately high number--815 million--of the world's hungriest and chronically malnourished people live in mountain regions. In a message to the International Conference on Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development in Mountains, held in Adelboden, Switzerland, FAO DirectorGeneral Jacques Diouf said malnutrition and food insecurity in mountain regions contributed to increased disease and disability, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing drought and famine.

The high levels of malnutrition and hunger in mountain areas have much to do with the inaccessibility, complexity and fragility of their environments, and the extent to which mountain people are often marginalized. In the Ethiopian highlands, as well as in the Upper Rwaba watershed of Burundi, for example, inequities of land distribution, coupled with population growth, have increased poverty and food insecurity. In the Peruvian Andes, two of every three households do not possess enough arable land to grow foods required to meet their nutritional needs. Every day, mountain people face immense physical barriers--rugged terrain, poor communications systems and inadequate roads.

Millions of people in the Andes, Himalayas and other large mountain areas suffer from goitre and cretinism because melting snow and heavy rainfall regularly leach fragile mountain soils of their iodine content. In many mountain communities, vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children, while raising the risk of disease and death from severe infections.

Leaders attending the World Food Summit renewed their global commitment to reduce the number of the hungry no later than 2015. The Summit Declaration recognized in particular the extent of poverty in the mountain zones and emphasized the vital role of these zones and their potential for sustainable agriculture and rural development to achieve food security. It stressed the need to build partnerships between developing countries in this regard.

FAO is the lead United Nations agency for the International Year of Mountains. Its partners include other United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations, the Mountain Forum, mountain people's organizations and more than 67 national committees around the world, with many more countries preparing to join. The FAO priority is to stimulate long-term, on-the-ground action by supporting national committees dedicated to the International Year.

The United Nations declared 2002 the International Year of Mountains to increase awareness of the global importance of mountain ecosystems and the challenges faced by mountain people. The Adelboden Conference addresses these issues which evolved from the 1992 Rio Conference, which made mountains the singular focus of Chapter 13 of Agenda 21. The Conference will help set the stage for policies and laws meant to protect mountain ecosystems and to create the conditions in which mountain people can thrive. The Adelboden Declaration will be presented in August at the World Summit on Sustainable Development and in October at the Bishkek Global Mountain Summit in Kyrgystan.