By 2019, more than 26% of the world’s population is not assured of a meal. More than 800 million people (one in nine) suffer from hunger on our planet. According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted worldwide, which according to this organization represents approximately 1.3 billion tons per year. It is immoral that there is only one person in the world who goes hungry while the rest of us allow ourselves the luxury of wasting food, of living in indecent abundance without thinking of the consequences that this unjust distribution of resources imposes on millions of people who do not have guaranteed food.
This Scourge, of course, is directly related for the people who suffer it with other calamities like the poverty that many people suffer trying to survive with less than two dollars a day. The political instability that often leads to armed conflicts and wars that impose on the populations that suffer them the need to flee, becoming displaced people for whom access to food becomes their ordeal, making hunger even a weapon of war. Finally, we cannot ignore another of today’s great problems, climate change, which causes the loss of fertility of agricultural land, its desertification and the consequent displacement of people (climate migrants) in search of other places where they can access agricultural land and food.
Sustainable Development Goal 2 aims to end this calamity. A problem that is really pressing when we talk about child malnutrition, about children! We are facing a humanitarian crisis that did not arise yesterday, has been installed in our society for decades and is not a problem only located in other continents, is among us, in Spain, where more than half a million people are in a situation of severe food insecurity (FAO). Hunger is a global problem, derived from an economic and social system with a serious imbalance in the distribution of wealth and resources. An unequal system in which we feed the existence of the poor and hungry on the basis of our own well-being, overlooking any hint of conscience and solidarity.
We suffer with stoicism the electoral campaigns every four years, lately it even seems that we are in daily electoral campaign, be they national, European, even from other countries. Those who pull the global strings of the economy and of any other major geopolitical issues. However, none of them talk about hunger, about the millions of people who suffer from it, or about solutions to the problem. Instead, they talk about their countries, where in many cases these people live. But the issue is different, other resources are what really matter, those that are worth more than these people and their needs, those that are worth a vote.
But this is not only a political question, it is above all a social question for each and every one of us in our daily lives, in our way of living, consuming, of being in solidarity, of helping, but above all of fighting for a system based on social justice, on equality. A system that seeks to reduce as much as possible the gap between rich and poor. An economic and social model that guarantees the equal distribution of resources. On the contrary, it should abandon the indiscriminate plundering of countries and their resources. A model that banishes the concept of “humanitarian aid” in favor of one in which each person has access to sufficient food, to nutrition that confers health and well-being like that enjoyed by all of us who have been fortunate enough to live in a world of abundance.
Think about all this every time you waste your share of those 1.3 billion tons of food we throw away, without thinking about the consequences that this selfish and voracious consumerism is having for the almost 1 billion people who live every day in a situation of food crisis, who go hungry!
