Standing alongside delegations from CELAM, the central organization for Latin American conferences of bishops, and SECAM, the African co-operative for bishops’ conferences, plus CIDSE, representing the Catholic development agencies of Europe plus Canada, Development and Peace plans to push the conference to concentrate on agricultural policy.

“Sustainable, small-scale, ecological agriculture can actually help lessen greenhouse gas emissions — apart from the fact that small-scale agriculture is the best way to provide food for the poor,” said Durran.

Development and Peace is a signatory to the “Rio+20: Time to Act” statement (www.timetoactrio20.org/en/), which has so far attracted the support of about 200 NGOs. The statement declares governments should support small-scale farming and break-up the world’s largest agri-businesses.

“Industrial food production is a key cause of environmental and social harm and needs urgently to be reduced in size and impact. The solution is smaller-scale, ecological food production systems,” says the eight-page manifesto.

In addition to promoting small-scale agriculture, the declaration excoriates the diet of North American and European consumers.

“The average adult in an OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) country eats an unnecessary and unhealthy extra meal each day (roughly an extra 750 calories). About 25 per cent of the energy and water — and the associated greenhouse gas produced in OECD countries — goes to waste food. At least 50 per cent of OECD adults are overweight or obese. Obesity costs the OECD states almost $300 billion per year — an amount that is more than enough to meet all the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, with about $100 billion left over,” says the Time To Act declaration.

The Rio conference is exactly where Development and Peace should be, said Dennis Patrick O’Hara, a theology professor at Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College.

“You can’t have healthy people on a sick planet,” said O’Hara, who also directs the Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology, in an e-mail to The Catholic Register.

“If we continue to compromise the health of the planet we will continue to compromise the sustainability of humans.” 

Getting involved internationally with global food production fits with Development and Peace’s historic commitment to helping peasant farmers in Latin America, Africa and Asia, said Simon Appolloni, a former Development and Peace staffer who is now working on his PhD in environment and religion.

“If we do not address — and wholeheartedly at that — the present and real threat of climate change, any pretensions to Christian solidarity are merely empty deeds or words and ultimately fruitless,” said Appolloni in an e-mail.

“It’s not that new,” said Durran. “We have always said to people, ‘Live sustainably and take good care of the Earth.’ This is part of that. A good deal of climate change is caused by our collective failure to take good care of the Earth.”