“Allowing millions of human beings to live — and die — as victims of hunger is a collective failure, an ethical aberration, a historical fault,” Pope Leo XIV said on World Food Day yesterday. Source: OSV News.
The Pope addressed world leaders and government representatives at the Rome headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. In addition to marking World Food Day, the delegates were celebrating the 80th anniversary of FAO’s establishment.
In his speech, Pope Leo decried the fact that while humanity has made huge advances in technology, medicine, agriculture and transportation, 673 million people go to bed hungry each night, and 2.3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.
The FAO statistics are not just numbers, he said, “behind each of these numbers is a broken life, a vulnerable community.”
“This is not a coincidence, but the clear sign of a prevailing insensitivity, of a soulless economy, of a questionable model of development, and of an unjust and unsustainable system of resource distribution.”
Perhaps referring to the situation in Gaza, but also to other war zones, the Pope said that “current conflict scenarios have brought back the use of food as a weapon of war”.
A global conviction that “deliberate starvation as well as the intentional obstruction of access to food for communities or entire peoples, constitutes a war crime” seems to be slipping away, he said.
The “cruel strategy” of using food as a weapon of war, the Pope said, “condemns men, women and children to hunger by denying them the most basic right: the right to life.”
While governments have an obvious role in addressing hunger, Pope Leo said no one can consider the problem to be someone else’s responsibility.
“Those who suffer from hunger are not strangers,” he said. “They are my brothers and sisters, and I must help them without delay.”
Hunger “is a cry rising to heaven, demanding a swift response from every nation, from every international body, from every regional, local or private entity,” he said. “It is a battle that belongs to us all.”
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World hunger is ‘collective failure,’ Pope says on World Food Day (By Cindy Wooden, OSV News)
