The leitmotiv of the 40th session of FAO’s Conference, held in Rome from July 3-8, was to value agriculture, said the Holy See’s diplomat, Father Fernando Chica Arellano, Permanent Observer to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), entity of the United Nations concerned with agricultural development and the consequent fight against hunger.
Beginning from the data on hunger and malnutrition in the world, and not forgetting the 500 million obese, in an article published in the daily L’Osservatore Romano, the Spanish priest acknowledged that “the final note of the Conference in fact is bitter: the conviction that if we remain in the present situation, to eliminate hunger by 2013 is an impossible task.”
He explained that the International Community fixed the goal in the 2030 agenda of sustainable development, and to achieve it requires a “concrete alliance on the part of all the actors that can operate alongside the States: the private sector, the civil society, all forms of organization, the religions and the Churches.”
Therefore, he asserted, “to reach this goal it is necessary to establish strategies that do not exclude any relation among donors and any component among beneficiaries.”
He also specified that it is necessary “to plan a sustainable form of agricultural production accompanied by the capacity to elaborate and implement adequate answers, not only in relation to the use of the land, of the agricultural, forest and maritime resources, of water, its production and commercialization, but the continuity of the life of persons and of all communities.”
In regard to the waste of food, he said it is connected with “the models of consumption and lifestyles,” with direct implications of an ethical order. Therefore, “individual and collective commitment is the only way that can be followed.”
