Column U.S. says food is not a right, but silent on ending
poverty
By ROBERT F. DRINAN
The first World Food Summit in 22
years brought numerous world leaders and delegates to Rome last November. The
pledge and promise that resulted were impressive: reduce the number of hungry
people by half by the year 2015 -- from 840 million to 420 million.
The 35-page plan of action drawn up by the Food and Agricultural
Organization, the conference sponsor, is fact-filled and moving. But after
reading the carefully crafted recommendations and all the statistical material,
one is left with the conviction that the international community should be
doing more.
One has to be sympathetic to the officials and bureaucrats who do
all they can to conquer the daunting problem before them. But the document
silently proves that what is lacking is the political will to phase out
poverty.
It almost seems as if the United States is weary of the struggle
that Presidents Jack Kennedy and Gerald Ford faced courageously. In the 1970s
the U.S. Congress passed a resolution ratifying the right to food and decreed
that every action of the U.S. must take the right to food into consideration.
But in Rome last November, the U.S. delegation came out looking weak by its
legalistic pronouncement that the right to food is not really guaranteed by
international law.
In one of the conference's 15 written recommendations, the United
States also objected to the goal that rich nations should spend 0.7 percent of
their annual economic wealth on aid to poor nations. It stressed the need to
remove trade barriers in order to diminish hunger.
The specifics in the declaration at the end of the summit are
heartbreaking. Some 26 nations, for example, suffer constant water shortages;
this affects 230 million inhabitants. One-half of the world's hungry people --
420 million -- reside in Asia.
Then U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali decried the
extent of hunger among children: 200 million children under the age of seven
are undernourished. A child dies every eight seconds. He appealed for a new
"mobilization against hunger."
The outlook for the future is foreboding. The conference was
reminded again and again that the world will add another 2.5 billion people in
the next 25 years. The 90 million persons added each year to the global village
cannot be expected to count on the fantastic results of the green revolution,
which seems to be reaching a plateau; inexorable yield increases cannot be
relied upon.
There are, however, some signs of hope. Biotechnology continues
its miracles in pest control and in developing a new strain of "super rice." In
the United States, the Department of Agriculture forecasts that the corn and
soy bean crops this year will be the second or third largest on record.
The awful spectacle of over a million refugees wandering
helplessly in the mountains and forests of eastern Zaire haunted those in
attendance at conference. The delegates had to wonder how much their lofty
recommendations and noble aspirations would help those victims of ethnic and
racial violence.
The comprehensive declaration on world food security issued by the
conferees has to be one of the most compelling statements on this agonizing
topic ever issued by any international body. But, for political and strategic
reasons, the declaration could not speak of the $900 billion spent each year on
the military by all the nations of the earth.
Alone among the major spokesmen in Rome, the pope mentioned the
vast sums spent on the military. This more than any other factor considered at
the Rome conference makes impossible an adequate distribution of food. If even
one-third of the $900 billion consumed each year by the military could be
diverted to the production and distribution of food, the goal of the conference
to decrease by half the 800 million people who are chronically malnourished by
the year 2015 could be achieved in a matter of months.
But the slaughter goes on. Over 35,000 children will die of hunger
the day you read this column. And every day.
Fr. Robert Drinan is a professor at Georgetown University Law
Center.
National Catholic Reporter, February 14,
1997
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