Pope Benedict XVI’s June 14 prayers in St. Peter’s Square on behalf of “the hundreds of millions of persons who suffer from hunger” weren’t just a standard plea for the poor. The Pope had in mind a June 24-26 United Nations meeting in New York and the July 8-10 G8 summit hosted by Italy. At both meetings delegates will wrestle with what to do about more than a billion people — one in every six human beings alive — who goes hungry, according to the United Nations World Food Program . The World Health Organization estimates that each year 3.5 million children under the age of five die of hunger and related diseases.
“Obviously it’s a moral issue,” Anne-Laura Constantin, policy expert with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in Geneva, told The Catholic Register. “It’s not sustainable to have a world where some people go deeper and deeper into hunger and poverty and others get richer and richer. The economic crisis we’re in at the moment shows that this just doesn’t work.”
It’s a moral challenge that has re-energized the Catholic development world. The 16 members of the Catholic network of development agencies, CIDSE , recently teamed up with the IATP to issue “Global Food Responsibility,” an analysis of how European and United States trade policies keep farmers poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
For the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, a renewed focus on helping small farmers produce food is in line with its new partnership with Canada Foodgrains Bank and International Development Minister Bev Oda’s May 20 announcement that Canada would concentrate its aid dollars in three areas: food security, sustainable economic development and children and youth.
“It’s not new. It’s just renewed,” said Development and Peace executive director Michael Casey.
Casey sees the food crisis as part and parcel of a broader set of issues.
“We’ve got three crises converged at the same time,” he said. “Climate change, the economic crisis and the food crisis. Everybody in the development community is looking at what does this convergence mean, and what are some of the ways out of this situation.”
While Casey sees work on food security and helping small-holder farmers as renewing an area that’s been a mainstay of Development and Peace work since 1967, church concern with food and hunger as a moral issue goes back much further.
“Are you not a robber, you who consider your own that which has been given to you solely for others?” St. Basil the Great asked in the fourth century. “This bread which you have set aside is the bread of the hungry.”
Jesuit Father Jim Profit, director of the Jesuit Collaborative for Ecology, Forestry and Agriculture in Guelph, Ont., takes St. Basil at his word.
“We have a number of hungry people in the world, so how we produce food is very important for the hungry. But more importantly, how we distribute food is important, because hunger is not really an issue of production,” said Profit.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization backs Profit up. According to the FAO, the grains produced in one year are enough to feed the world for 425 days — 16 per cent above actual needs.
In the midst of this abundance and the tons of food that pass from grocery store shelves to refrigerators to Canadian green bins without ever touching a taste bud, farmers have suffered, said Profit.
“Small-scale food production has been in crisis since the 1980s, and that’s around the world,” said Profit. “What happened last year is that we notice it because of the riots.”
Are people noticing farmers in India who have committed suicide as they face starvation and financial ruin? Profit thinks the plight of farmers, and even bare facts about where food comes from, are a mystery to most of us.
“We lead urban lives,” he said. “The majority of us are urban people. In this country, we’re not confronted by riots because people are hungry.”
Though Profit does find some hope in the buy local and organic food movements, it’s going to take a lot more understanding at much higher levels to give farmers a fair shake, he said.
“Subsidies that governments in the north provide their farmers are significant — Canada less so than the United States,” he said. “Europe and the United States are big players. Those are the countries that have the power to control both production and who should buy.”
Which is why the CIDSE organizations want to go beyond just funding farm co-operatives. They’re trying to influence World Trade Organization negotiations. CIDSE and IATP argue that the bogeyman of protectionism is being used to keep markets open for huge agricultural corporations who can easily swamp the entire agricultural sectors of small, poor countries.
“Part of the problem with how agriculture has been handled over the last three decades is that it has really lacked the necessary protection for the sector to develop,” said Constantin of IATP. “In every country where you have sustainable food security and more economic development — sustainable or not — those are all countries that started by protecting their agricultural sector.”
At some point a just agriculture policy also comes down to money, points out theologian Dennis Patrick O’Hara, director of the Toronto-based Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology. On average Canadians spend 15 per cent of household income on food, according to Statistics Canada data released June 9. Americans spend 16 per cent, the French 24 per cent and the Chinese 41 per cent. If you want a flourishing, environmentally responsible food sector you have to pay for it, said O’Hara.
Constantin looks at the organic garden on the White House lawn, Obama’s nominations to the WTO and the recognition by G8 leaders that food security is an issue for them too and sees reasons to hope. But she’s not naive.
“There are big industrial interests that are going to stand in the way of that,” she said. “But I think that change is on the way.”
See also: Development agencies wonder how effective Canadian aid is