No Tears for the Hungry

No Tears for the Hungry

18 November 2009

It is hard to believe that in this age of plenty, nearly a billion people—nearly a quarter of the world’s population –still go hungry. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva was right on the dot when he described hunger as the “most devastating weapon of mass destruction” at the UN food summit in Rome on Monday.

Despite all the progress human race has made, it cannot feed its own in the 21st century.  Food is the most basic of all basic necessities for survival. Everything else is secondary.

Which is why this is a real shame that the 3-day global summit to fight hunger failed to come up with any concrete and more effective measures to take on the challenge.  Even though all the right noises were made by world leaders, from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (he was the only leader from the G8 nations to attend it) to Pope Benedict XVI at the Rome summit on fighting global hunger, at the end of the day it turned out to be nothing but a talkfest. So although some pious statements were made on the need to feed the world’s hungry, no definite commitments were offered by the rich, industrialised nations.

No wonder UN food agency chief Jacques Diouf is unhappy with the final declaration of the summit which wowed “urgent action” to boost food security without offering any definitive targets.  Aid agency Oxfam has described it as “uncosted, unfunded and unaccountable.” Their consternation is justified, given the fact every day thousands of people, most of them children, die of hunger.  And the UN fears if no steps are taken soon, at least 370 million people face famine 
and death.

The Rome declaration comes a day after the United States and other big powers at the APEC summit in Singapore effectively derailed the much awaited Copenhagen summit on climate change, saying it’s ‘unrealistic’ to seek a globally binding new protocol on carbon emissions.  How long will the movers and shakers of our world shirk their international commitments and responsibilities, especially on problems and crises that are a result of their own policies for decades?

As UN chief Ban ki-Moon argued at the Rome summit, a climate change deal is crucial to fighting global hunger and poverty.  No food security is possible without climate security. In 2005, the G8 nations had promised to offer $50bn in aid to Africa by 2010, and wealthy countries pledged $12bn at a UN food summit this June. How much of that has reached the world’s poor? Very little. It’s about time the rich nations stopped playing the games they have been playing all these years. They cannot, as former UN chief Kofi Annan put it yesterday, hide behind the global recession. For if they do not act to help the world’s hungry, they will soon have those starving multitudes descending on their countries.