A shocking scandal

The report published last week by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation makes shocking reading indeed. It informs us that about 842 million people worldwide are undernourished, with the number of chronically hungry people growing at nearly five million a year.

The report said the fight against world hunger was being lost and that countries would not meet the goal stated at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome to reduce by half the number of undernourished people by 2015.

This report points to the relevance of the speech delivered by Fr Gustavo Gutierres last month about poverty. Fr Gutierrez showed that the elimination of poverty demands more than charity. In line with these words the UN report says that its appeal was "based not on a plea for charity but on a demand for justice and an appeal to the self-interest of almost everyone, recognising that the suffering of almost 800 million hungry people represents not only an unconscionable tragedy but a threat to economic growth and political stability on a global scale".

Those who say that poverty is a result of the increase in the world's population do not find a lot of comfort in this report. "Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will," it said.

The report also said that while drought and other natural disasters remained the most common cause of food shortages, "an increasing proportion were man-made. The vast majority of the world's hungry people live in rural areas of the developing world, far from the levers of power and beyond the range of vision of the media and the public in developed countries."

Not everything is bleak and black. The report revealed that 19 countries reduced the number of hungry people by 80 million by 2001. FAO said there were encouraging signs in the fight against world hunger, signalling out for praise Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has promised to eradicate hunger by the end of his four-year term. China has reduced its number of undernourished by 58 million, while Vietnam saw a 3 million reduction.

The report posits a question that challenges the conscience of each living person on our earth: "If we already know the basic parameters of what needs to be done, why have we allowed millions of people to go hungry in a world that produces more than enough food for every woman, man and child?"