The Vatican released the text of the Pope's letter for World Food Day in French and Italian, so I have not had time to translate. Here is the AP story about it.
Pope Benedict calls for
'determined' action on hunger
Left, start and end of Pope's letter to FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, posted on the FAO website.
ROME, Oct. 16 (AP) – The world must take "determined and effective" action against hunger after the global economic crisis pushed the ranks of the undernourished to a record 1 billion, Pope Benedict XVI said Friday.
Developing countries need more investments, especially in agriculture, to ensure their populations don't go hungry, the pope said in a message to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization on World Food Day.
"This crisis requires governments and the members of the international community to make determined and effective choices," Benedict said in the message read at an FAO ceremony. "Access to food is more than a basic need, it is a fundamental right of individuals and peoples."
Benedict has frequently spoken out on the crisis, calling for a new world financial order guided by ethics and urging the world not let its poorest and most vulnerable inhabitants suffer the consequences of the downturn.
The crisis "is especially serious for the agricultural world, where the situation becomes dramatic," Benedict said in his message. "Agriculture must have at its disposal enough investments and resources."
The FAO said this week that aid and investment in agriculture have been declining over the past two decades, contributing to increased hunger.
This year, the number of hungry people around the world reached 1.02 billion amid high food prices and the global financial meltdown, according to the Rome-based agency.
The FAO says global food output will have to increase by 70 percent to feed a projected population of 9.1 billion in 2050. To achieve that, poor countries will need $44 billion in annual agricultural aid, compared with the current $7.9 billion.
Earlier Friday, among other events to mark World Food Day, the FAO named five new goodwill ambassadors including track and field great Carl Lewis and fashion designer Pierre Cardin.
NB: The Holy Father is scheduled to address the opening of the World Summit on Food Security at FAO headequarters in Rome on Nov. 16.
To mark World Food Day today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation has launched a website on world hunger,
www.fao.org/hunger/en/
which includes an interactive map that shows trends in the percentage of the world's population experiencing hunger in recent decades. The map is downloadable.
www.fao.org/hunger/en/
The information is bracketed into two-year periods up until 2006 – 1990-92, 1995-97, 2000-02 and 2004-06.
The interactive also provides country specific "hunger statistics" for each of these periods. Click on a country and population figures, the number of those undernourished, the prevalence of undernourishment and daily dietary energy supply pop up.
Earlier this week, the UN organisation published its annual report on world hunger.
Many of you have no doubt come across an item that has received quite some media play worldwide, going by the Yahoo catalog of press outlets that have used it - about some American comedian I never heard about before this, who said the Church should sell the Vatican to end world hunger. It was one of those items so mindlessly preposterous that clearly ought to be ignored.
But now, without commenting on the utter stupidity of it, one must also take note that the editor of the ultra-liberal US Jesuit mouthpiece, AMERICA magazine, Fr. James Martin, actually wrote something to the effect that maybe the comedian 'is on to something' - his concluding line to his essay - after properly covering his ***, of course . What is this world coming to???? When a hitherto reputable Jesuit hitches his star - to some comedian to make a point???
The problem of hunger is much too fundamental to be trifled with irresponsibly.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/10/2009 18:46]