ANOTHER World Food Day has passed with another rich harvest of pious pronouncements and empty rhetoric.
It is too bad political pieties do not contain calories and nutrition. The solution to world hunger would be at hand.
“The world has the means to implement the right to food,” United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization director general Jacques Diouf proclaimed in New York Oct. 18 before lunch. “The time has come to take action.”
For good measure, presumably to show how serious the FAO and the world really are about tackling this little political problem of as many as 900 million chronically hungry people in the world, he proclaimed the launch of the International Year of the Potato.
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Then last week, we celebrated World Pasta Day.
Who says the world isn’t taking this hunger issue seriously?
Even Lennart Bage, Rome-based president of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development, said during a visit to Ottawa that all is not gloom and doom.
India, once a regular host of famine, now is far more food-stable and scores of millions of Chinese citizens have risen out of poverty during that country’s aggressive economic expansion.
“Progress is possible,” he said. “Progress is happening. People should not think this is a problem too big or entrenched to tackle.”
It was an optimistic note at the end of an interview during which the main topic was that the developed world, including Canada, is letting the world’s poorest citizens down by reducing its support for agricultural development in its foreign aid budget.
It is easy to be cynical about the real commitment of the well fed to help the chronically hungry. Review a bit of history.
In 1974 amid predictions of food shortages and mass starvation, world leaders gathered at FAO headquarters in Rome and pledged that within a decade, the estimated 800 million chronically food-deprived people would be “free from hunger.”
In 1996, world politicians gathered again, admitted their failure and promised that by 2015, world poverty and hunger would be cut in half. Malnutrition was then estimated to afflict 810 million people.
Last week in its first agriculture-centred development report in 25 years, the Washington-based World Bank estimated that hunger is a daily companion of as many as 900 million people.
Some progress! Perhaps the pledgers imagine themselves good Christians living out the gospel of John admonition that “the poor you will have with you always.”
In fact, Canada was a poster boy for hypocrisy on the hunger file at the 1996 conference. Even as the country was embracing the promise to fight hunger, the government in Ottawa was living with the results of the sharpest cut in the foreign aid budget in history and the Canadian International Development Agency still has not recovered.
In 2003, former CIDA minister Susan Whelan promised government would increase its agricultural development aid budget to $500 million by next year. It will struggle to get to $200 million.
If pious rhetorical statements were horses, then the hungry would eat.
Happy Year of the Potato. If it was tied to Year of Cooking Oil, we could have some fries.
