There are facts that, although they have been repeated many times, must not lose their impact. Hunger is one of these. This does not refer to malnutrition, which continues to condemn a thousand million people on our planet to suffer.
Hunger, with a capital H, is being deliberately deprived of being able to meet the needs that we refer to as basic: nutrition (food and drink), protection, health, education, and shelter. This privation is a logical consequence of a system that makes it impossible to access a dignified job and wage.
If we avoid falling into the trap of official, biased statistics, this Hunger affects more than 83% of humanity. And just 1% of the money set aside to prop up the corrupt financial system would be enough to ensure that no-one went hungry. In this world, between 10 and 50% of all food produced is wasted, according to the FAO (The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations); necessary, basic goods are turned into products open to speculation; and a vast chasm of inequality has been cemented. We need to remember that Hunger is murder. It is a political assassination.
Politicians refer to aid, welfare, sponsorship, fair trade, or other campaigns and projects as justice or solidarity. However, these measures are a prostitution of true justice and solidarity, which would require an immediate end to global Hunger. Paternalistic aid, whether private or public, plays with the good will of the people (and their ‘good conscience’) and serves to hide the main cause of this situation – a lack of genuine political will! While ‘civil society’ welfare is extolled, transnational imperialists promote political reforms as a means of solving the global economic ‘crisis’. These reforms, in reality, serve to prop up the current institutional ‘disorder’, which is based on greed for profit and power.
Today, the Campaign for Justice in North-South Relations, which launched the Christian Cultural Movement 35 years ago. From the very beginning, it denounced both the political causes of injustice and the welfare system that aimed to hide them from view. Today it is clear that, without political will born from a new culture and civilisation of solidarity, these problems will not be solved.
Publishing house of Self-management magazine
