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For the poor, the near future seems bleak. While world food prices have declined, they remain close to their 2008 peaks in many poor countries; as a result, the number of hungry people has grown by 40 million; and with prices for seeds and fertilizers more than doubling since 2006, many poor farmers cannot increase production. This means, according to FAO, that some one billion people worldwide are going hungry.
Few people are aware that climate change will cause severe droughts in many parts of the world and turn fertile lands into deserts. But an expert warned sometime ago: one third of the planet will be a desert by 2100 if climate change is not addressed urgently.
Unless more intelligent and creative management is brought to the world’s agricultural systems, the 2008 food crisis – which plunged millions back into hunger – may foreshadow an even bigger crisis in the years to come. The warning comes from the United Nations Environment Program that underlines the almost incredible waste of food that the present model implies.
Sudan, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, Iraq, Myanmar and Pakistan. In Africa and Asia, these eight countries suffered, in 2008, the worst humanitarian and medical emergencies. Last year, the world was also affected by a surge of cases of tuberculosis in HIV patients and “pandemic” malnutrition that costed the lives of up to 5 million children under the age of five. According to the Doctors Without Borders, these are the “Top Ten” crises that need to be closely followed in the near future.
It is fundamental to comprehend that we have to move from a socio-environmental vision, which is exclusively centered on the well-being of human beings, to a posture that incorporates the respect, the care, the preventive and defensive action towards all living beings, that is, of life in its plenitude and magnitude. This is one of the conclusions of the second Comboni Social Forum, held during the World Social Forum that took place in Belém (Brazil), and a step towards a new missionary attitude.
Rough, stubborn, a man of few words, but imbued with a lively faith that made his blue eyes sparkle, Gino Filippini was a lay missionary capable of listening and sharing more than many. He was not married because such was the choice he made with joy when he was young. He wanted to belong totally to God and to the poor. A rare form of cancer, contracted in the rubbish dump of Nairobi, claimed his life at the peak of its maturity.
“As the Father sent me, I also send you.”
(Read John 20:19-23)
Conventional wisdom claims that the only way to increase agricultural output is through modernizing agriculture. But, in the contrary, experts say that organic farming holds the key to food security in Africa.
