She was one of those university “experts” the CBC news network likes to use to fill time and she sounded so sure of herself.
As world leaders flocked to the splendour of United Nations head offices in New York last week and the five-star hotels around it to talk about efforts to accomplish “millennium development goals” set 10 years ago, she was asked about the goal of cutting world hunger in half by 2015.
“We will probably meet the hunger target,” she said. “Some other goals like maternal health will be missed.”
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Pardon?
The world will fulfill the solemn promise made a decade ago by scores of world leaders, including Canada’s Jean Chrétien, to reduce world hunger, then in the 800 million range, by 50 percent within 15 years?
Hardly. Chronic and widespread world hunger continues to be a blight on the world, a disgrace caused by lack of political will and not at all by available resources or a lack of food.
It is difficult to know what database the expert professor was basing her opinion upon since just the week before, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported hunger statistics that were strikingly different from her assertion.
The FAO said the number of chronically hungry people in the world declined this year to 925 million from last year’s estimate of just over one billion. The official figures will be published in October.
However, the number will not catch the tens of millions of Pakistanis destitute because of flooding this summer or the impact of higher summer grain prices.
But even taking the FAO number at face value, the number of people suffering health or developmental problems because of chronic malnutrition is more than it was when the world pledged to cut it in half.
With five years to go, the goal is impractical.
“Achieving that goal would mean cutting the number of hungry by over 500 million in the next five years,” the FAO said. Mission impossible.
It is a willful calamity, perpetrated by local leaders who seem to care little for their people and by sanctimonious international leaders who seem to think that simply announcing an end to poverty will make it so.
This is a world awash in food.
This is a world where getting food from here to there is eminently possible, where investment in developing world agriculture would help people feed themselves.
And this is a world where governments talk a good game.
Canadians, generous to their core, donate millions of dollars each year through their churches and charities to help provide food aid.
But those efforts, laudable as they are, do not substitute for an international effort to end the man-made blight of chronic hunger.
Leaders blithely insist we need to spend billions of dollars on climate change mitigation policies to temper global warming that will possibly avert a disaster decades down the road.
Leaders insist we spend billions of dollars to fight wars, whether the money was budgeted or not.
Yet in the time it takes to read this column, more than a hundred children in the world will have died from the effects of malnutrition.
World hunger is a political crime.
