The longer the world takes to tackle climate change and address inequalities the more precarious the lives of millions of our brothers and sisters.
Each year the link between World Food Day (16 October) and for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 Day) encourage us to think about what is involved in eradicating poverty and in putting food on everyone’s table.
This year the gap is growing between those who need not worry about their next meal, and those for whom it is not taken for granted but is a surprise gift. Despite knowing this, developed nations leave unaddressed the large factors that contribute to hunger and poverty.
The theme of World food Day – The right to foods for a better life and a better future – meets the reality that the issue now is less about rights than about possibility.
INCREASING INEQUALITY
Already inequality in the world and the breaking of supply chains as a result of hostility between nations have raised the price of food, and have made it difficult even for many Australians to eat healthily and well.
The failure to address climate change, too, will mean that many people will starve, much land will become infertile, and their inhabitants will live in extreme poverty. The promise that no one will go hungry will seem increasingly empty.
The fragility that flows from the need simultaneously to address the large and pressing issues that face humanity and to make available good food to all can be seen if we google World Food Day. It produces advertisements for gourmet foods. These will no doubt include beef meals. Yet in Australia, beef production contributes to methane and so to emissions, and also leads to the deforestation of enormous tracts of vegetation in order that cattle may graze.
Both consequences flowing from our taste for red meat contribute to the global warming that will affect the access to food of future generations of people, and particularly of those in less well-endowed nations.
CHOOSE WELL
To eradicate poverty and to share good food we need to make choices that we would not have faced a generation ago. They concern what we buy and eat, and how we live. We need also to persuade our fellow Australians to make similar choices, and to push governments to act in ways that will help feed the world.
This challenge is difficult. In producing, selling, and eating food in a way which ensures that people everywhere are fed, many relationships are involved. Each of them is open to manipulation; each must be just. It is important that farmers receive a just price for their food, and that there be space for retail markets where small farmers can sell their produce more profitably. It is important, too, that the relationships between farmers and chemical companies that provide seeds, fertilisers and insecticides, do not create dependency and monocultures. The 19th century potato famine in Ireland offers a chilling example of the importance of respecting our environment.
To eradicate hunger, we need to be curious about a world wider than our own and to see its flourishing as our responsibility. We must ask why people there starve, and stay while we listen to their answer. This can be a dangerous question.
Helder Camara said that if he fed the poor people called him a saint. If he asked why they were poor and starving, they tried to get rid of him because he was a Communist. Poverty and its devastating effects on people arise out of inequality in the world and the greed that underlies it.
SOCIAL BONDS
As Pope Francis has said many times, all profitable activity has a social bond – it needs to attend to the need of the whole community and particularly of its most vulnerable members. This is true within nations and also between them. People starve in Gaza because of war not by their own choice or by God’s will but as the result of others’ actions and failures to act. The eradication of poverty within nations and internationally ultimately depends on a change of heart. It will lead us to recognise that each human being, each human life, matters and that we are brothers and sisters, not competitors. These days remind us of that.
