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Dreams can be powerful things, especially when articulated by leaders with the realistic capacity to translate them into action. That was the case 50 years ago with Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and it also seems to be the ambition of Pope Francis’ bold new apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel.”
Coca-Cola has said it will cut off suppliers that do not follow guidelines to protect the land rights of local communities in developing countries. The soft drinks company also pledged to use its clout to encourage other food and beverage firms, traders – especially of soy, sugar and palm oil – as well as governments to endorse and implement voluntary U.N. guidelines on responsible governance of tenure on land, fisheries and forests. “The Coca-Cola Company believes that land grabbing is unacceptable,” it said.
Aid workers have warned that children in the disaster zone left by typhoon Haiyan are particularly vulnerable, as they set up child-focused services to mitigate the impact. UNICEF estimates that 1.7M children are among the 4.4M people in the Philippines displaced by the disaster and said it was receiving reports of missing and separated children in Tacloban and Ormoc.
Britons are chucking out the equivalent of 24 meals a month, adding up to 4.2 million tons of food and drink every year that could have been consumed. Almost half of this is going straight from fridges or cupboards into the bin. One-fifth of what households buy ends up as waste, and around 60% of that could have been eaten.
Slavery in India ranges from bonded labor in quarries and kilns to commercial sex exploitation. It must be noted that slavery still exists in all 162 countries surveyed by Walk Free Foundation, an Australian-based anti-slavery group.
For Philippine diplomat Yeb Saño, the close of U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, last November 23, came with an unusual prize: he can eat again.
On weekday mornings in Mingora, the largest city in Swat Valley, Pakistan, the streets are filled with boys heading to school. Among them are smaller groups of schoolgirls laughing and tucking books under their arms, as they, too, head to school. The scene highlights how far the region has come in the past few years: The Swat Valley, famed for its picturesque mountains, saw more than 400 schools destroyed – more than half of them girls’ schools – when the Taliban took control of the region in 2008.
“It is not my work only. It is the Lord’s.” Such was the summation of Sr. Angelique Namaika, a member of the Augustine Sisters of Dungu and Doruma, as she spoke to reporters in an international conference call, upon winning the Nansen Refugee Award bestowed annually by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Namaika has been working for the past four years with women forced to leave their homes in the northeastern Congolese bush because of the ongoing civil strife in the Congo.
Governments in rich and poor countries alike should renounce their focus on agribusiness and give more support to small-scale, local food production to achieve global food security and tackle climate change, according to UNCTAD, the U.N. trade and development body.
The Comboni Missionaries are celebrating the 75th anniversary of their arrival in Peru, their first missionary field in Latin America. It was on September 11, 1938 that the three pioneers, Fr. Alois Ipfelkofer, Fr. Michael Wagner, both from Germany and Fr. Andrew Riedl from South Tirol, arrived at Callao Harbor near Lima, the capital.
