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Pope Francis urges leaders to view food and nutrition as public issues
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Saturday, 22 November, 2014, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Rome
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fiogf49gjkf0d Pope Francis urged politicians from around the world to view food and nutrition and the environment as global public issues at a time when nations are more tightly linked with each other than ever before. He added that if there was a lack of solidarity in one country, it was felt around the world.
He told delegates from the 172 nations attending the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) at the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) headquarters in Rome to make sure their pledges to assure food security to all citizens were put into concrete practice, stating that the right to a healthy diet was about dignity, not charitable handouts.
“Despite there being enough food for everyone, food issues are regularly subject to manipulated information, claims about national security, corruption and teary-eyed evocations of economic crisis,” the Pope said.
“That is the first challenge we need to overcome,” he added, urging that the rights of the human person needed to be embedded in all aid and development programmes.
“The fight against hunger and undernutrition is being handicapped by the priority of the market and the pre-eminence of profit, which have reduced food to a thing to be bought and sold, and subject to speculation,” the pontiff stated.
Pope Francis also highlighted the need to care for the environment and protect the planet. He added, “Humans may forgive but nature does not.”
He added, “We must care for Mother Nature, so that she does not respond with destruction.”
The pontiff flagged the upcoming UN climate conference in Peru (COP20) and France (COP21) as opportunities for doing so.
Global leaders approved the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and the Framework for Action, embracing voluntary principles aimed at addressing the major nutrition challenges and identifying the priorities for enhanced international cooperation on nutrition.
Among its priorities are to forge ways to tackle obesity, a growing global health problem even in lower-income countries, to combat the micronutrient deficiencies that affect two billion people worldwide, and assure the access of all people to healthy diets required for their individual development.
“For the first time in history, humanity can say that misery is not fate and that hunger is completely avoidable,” José Graziano da Silva, director general, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said.
“The presence of His Holiness here with us today reflects an ecumenical convergence on this point that is increasingly spreading among peoples of different latitudes, cultures and points of view,” he added.
Pope Francis has been an outspoken advocate for the poor, saying it is a God-given right of everyone to have access to adequate food and urging everyone to be more conscious of their food choices, including waste, to end the global scandal of hunger.
Earlier this month, he wrote a letter to global leaders at the G-20 summit in Brisbane, citing malnutrition as the first of the problems they should seek to solve.
Spain’s Queen Letizia was another speaker at ICN2. She highlighted the special importance of women in ensuring family nutrition.
She added that in addition to the moral imperative of tackling hunger, there was an economic one.
“Investing in better nutrition could raise productivity and economic growth, reduce health care costs and promote education,” she said.
The queen also called on multinational food and agricultural companies to join international development agencies and governments in order to promote better nutrition.
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