IN THE time it takes to read this column, at least 100 more children will have died in the world from the effects of malnutrition.
Yet for some reason, the good folks at United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome think Monday’s annual World Food Day was something to “celebrate” and they did it in grand style.
In co-operation with Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, the FAO is issuing a cartoon-style storybook entitled The Right to Food: A Window on the World, the organization announced.
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“The right to food is, in principle, the right to feed oneself and one’s family adequately and with dignity,” FAO assistant director general for sustainable development Alexander Müller said in a World Food Day statement. “Raising the awareness of young people about the inseparable nature of human rights, food security and good nutrition and about how each of us can play a part in helping secure everyone’s right to nutritionally adequate food is essential to this end.”
No argument on the benefits of teaching children about the principle of access to food being a basic human right. Sadly, though, it is a lesson their elders – those men and women who run the world – have not learned or certainly have not taken to heart.
It is why “celebrating” a day dedicated to the right to food is little more than a cruel joke.
Once the situation is bemoaned and solemn commitments are made to work on the problem, the world returns to its regular pattern of spending billions of dollars waging war, building weapons and armies, developing nuclear bombs, subsidizing corporations and the wealthy and pursuing policies that generally deepen the chasm between the world’s haves and have-nots.
A decade ago, national leaders and agriculture ministers gathered in Rome promising to cut hunger in half by 2015.
So what has happened?
In the past decade, the FAO estimates as many as 40 million more people have been added to the world rolls of those experiencing chronic malnutrition, hunger or starvation, now estimated at 840 million.
International development experts say a child dies from the effects of malnutrition every three to five seconds.
Meanwhile, the world’s ability to create food protein has never been greater, even if farmers are underpaid for it, and resources clearly exist to get the food to those who need it. Missing is the political will, imagination and energy to make it a reality.
In the 21st century, hunger amid plenty is a political choice rather than an inevitability, a moral and political blight.
But while the human toll from malnutrition exceeds by many times the annual toll from that other great modern plague, HIV/AIDS, fighting world hunger does not have the political momentum and profile that the AIDS fight has, led by the charismatic Bill Clinton, the eloquent Stephen Lewis, the rich Bill Gates.
Perhaps the holy grail of new cutting edge science as one of the answers is more exciting than the more boring reality that the miracle cure for malnutrition already has been created. It’s called food.
Perhaps the spectre of 840 million people at risk is just too large for these folks to grasp.
Let’s bring it down to street level then. Think of those 100 children.
