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Pope Leo calls for international cooperation to reach UN goal of ‘zero hunger’


(LifeSiteNews) — Pope Leo XIV called for international cooperation from institutions at all levels to work to alleviate hunger around the world during a Thursday speech at the Rome headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

“Let us not fall into the trap of seeing hunger as a problem to be solved. It is much more than that, it is a cry rising to Heaven demanding an urgent response from every nation, every international organization, every local or private institution,” Leo declared in an address given primarily in Spanish. 

Leo decried the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world “go to bed without eating” and the numbers of malnourished children, attributing this suffering to systemic problems such as a “soulless economy” and an “unfair and unsustainable system of resource distribution.”

The pontiff supported the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of “Zero Hunger,” declaring that the world can only achieve this if “there is a real will to do so.” The UN’s stated aim is a “world free of hunger by 2030.”

He went on to lament the fact that food is today being used as a “weapon of war” through the deliberate starvation of people, as has been occurring in Gaza. This denies people “the most elementary right: the right to life,” Leo said.

“We cannot continue like this, since hunger is not the destiny of man but his perdition,” he continued, using a word that traditionally has only been used in Catholicism to refer to the eternal damnation of a soul.

As Pope Francis did before him, Leo notably called for not merely voluntary solutions to hunger from charitable institutions but political solutions that treat “food security” as a “right,” presumably through welfare programs.

“Only by joining hands can we build a dignified future, in which food security is reaffirmed as a right and not as a privilege.” he exhorted.

He also further suggested he is in favor of resource redistribution, saying, “How can we continue to tolerate huge tons of food being wasted while crowds of people strive to find something in the trash to put in their mouths? How to explain the inequalities that allow a few to have everything and many to have nothing?”

Alleviating hunger, Leo said, can “only be achieved through the convergence of effective policies and a coordinated and synergistic implementation of interventions.” Given that he was addressing a UN body and that he stressed the “importance of multilateralism” in his speech, Leo seemed to refer to world coordination of anti-hunger policies by an international body such as the UN.

Going on to address FAO in English, Leo suggested that alleviating hunger requires not only efforts to distribute food or enable its attainment but a revamping of our own “lifestyles.”

“The hungry faces of so many who still suffer and invite us to reexamine our lifestyles, our priorities, and our overall way of living in today’s world,” Leo said.

“For this very reason, I want to bring to the attention of this international forum the multitudes who lack access to drinking water, food, essential medical care, decent housing, basic education, and dignified work, so that we can share in the pain of those who are nourished by despair, tears, and misery alone.”

Speaking of those who have suffered greatly from war and hunger in places like Ukraine, Gaza, and Haiti, Leo declared, “The international community cannot look the other way. We must make their suffering our own.”

“By our own omission we become complicit in the promotion of injustice,” he said.


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