Today in Rome started the FAO summit, the UN organization which has its international headquarters in Italy and that deals with food and agriculture in the world. Absent almost all the leaders of rich countries, the nations that should provide financial resources to FAO to combat world hunger. Absent from embarrassment, apart from our premier who must be present as the leader of the host country, and also because notoriously immune to shame.
With the excuse of the crisis the rich countries instead of the 44 billion dollars a year needed will only give 20 in three years, the only result achieved by this summer G8 in Italy and heralded as a huge diplomatic success by Berlusconi's TV regime. In reality it is much less than what was asked, only 15% of the 132 billion in three years, that according to the FAO would be the minimum necessary to avoid death by starvation of a huge number of people.
People who can die from lack of food, and often have no drinking water either, are at least a billion in the world today. About 6 million children will die of hunger this year, noted the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, but all the fine words of the summit and even the hunger strike of FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf to ask for more money probably will not accomplish anything. Is not just the fault of the crisis. World hunger is directly related to speculation in food markets.
Already well before the crisis speculation in the Chigago stock market and partly also the use of land resources for biofuels instead of food had caused a shortage of grain in Africa and Asia, causing riots, and of course lots of victims. So goes our world: some rich managers moving money and in Africa thousands of children die because they have nothing to eat. The problem may seem complex and intractable, but it is not so.
The world is already able to produce enough food to feed everyone, but its economic mechanisms artificially create scarcity in some places and abundance in others. The rich world wastes firstly an indecent amount of water and agriculture to feed the animals and allow its people to eat meat twice a day. An absurd habit that our grandparents would never have considered and which could never be sustained over the world.
Besides, poor countries often lack sufficient food because much of their land is occupied by monocultures, originated from colonialism and sold to rich countries for low prices. The food prices are being manipulated by financial capitalism of the West by purely speculative reasons. What matter if to lower the price of cocoa means to impoverish thousands of farmers in the developing world? What if lower banana prices in Europe means that the African and South American farmers will not have enough money to feed their families?
Of course would also help limit the population explosion in developing countries, encouraged in part by the actions of world religions against birth control, but the matter is not so simple. For those who are so poor as to possess only theirs body a certain number of children is an asset in labor force which becomes a problem during periods of food scarcity. It isn't a small matter also the huge amount of subsidies that rich countries give their farmers, making poor countries unable to compete fairly. Not to mention the large chapter of "unequal trade" to sell to developing countries weapons and technology products that they do not produce then make them pay dearly in agricultural products and debts that ultimately strangle whole nations. World hunger is not in fact the consequence of a free market, but is the result of a regulated market in favor of the rich to the detriment of the poor. Or to avoid euphemisms, it's the consequence of a series of shameless scams of the rich against the poor.
Those 44 billion a year that should have been given by the West as a generous donation were actually a minimum compensation for the systematic economic robbery practiced by rich countries against the rest of the world. But now even that seems too much, and then we will give only 20 in three years, maybe. Basically if 17,000 poor children have to die every day so we have enough luxurious tables and pastries to die of heart attacks and obesity, what's the problem?
Francesco Defferrari
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