The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report, ‘Preventing nutrient loss and waste across the food system: Policy actions for high-quality diets,' finds regularly eating poor-quality food has become a greater public health threat than malaria, tuberculosis or measles.

Poor-quality diets are defined as those including poor-quality food as well as those where there is insufficient food.

Three billion people worldwide are affected by poor-quality diets and one-in-five deaths worldwide are associated with poor-quality diets.

The FAO report is is urging policymakers to find ways to reduce food loss and waste and to improve access to nutritious and healthy food.

The report notes that although there is neither a lack of food, nor a lack in food quality when it's produced, food quality and quantity reduces after its production.

In low-income countries, the report finds "food is mostly lost during harvesting, storage, processing and transportation," whereas in high-income countries "the problem is one of waste at retail and consumer levels."

This is because low-income countries lack the necessary infrastructure, while in high-income countries, carelessness and "waste at the end of the food chain" prevail.

The report's authors say implementing the changes the report proposes would "contribute to the efficiencies needed to address climate change" and "unlock savings in water and energy consumption, land use, and resources used in industrial food fortification".

Source

• KFF
• Vatican News
• Image: World Economic Forum

Saying much can be done to help change this, Francis sent a message on Monday to participants in the 40th General Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations who were meeting in Rome.

He apologised for his inability to be with them.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin went to the conference on Francis's behalf and read his message for him.

He said the Holy See closely follows the work of the international community and wants to help promote ways to eliminate hunger and malnutrition rather than merely progress or develop goals in theory.

He went on to say the international community should acknowledge hunger and malnutrition are not "natural or structural phenomena.

"We are dealing with a complex mechanism that mainly burdens the most vulnerable, who are not only excluded from the processes of production, but frequently obliged to leave their lands in search of refuge and hope."

He also said intergovernmental organisations like those that work with the United Nations need to be able to intervene specifically and undertake an adequate solidarity action when "a country is incapable of offering adequate responses because its degree of development, conditions of poverty, climate changes or situations of insecurity.

"The reason hunger and malnutrition still exist is because of a "lack of a culture of solidarity," and countries are not doing enough to tackle the issue."

Francis's message warned the international community against "being bound only to the pragmatism of statistics or the desire for efficiency that lacks the idea of sharing."

He said solidarity needs to be the criterion behind the different forms of cooperation in international relations, since the goods entrusted to us by God are meant for everyone.

Source

• Vatican Radio
• Crux
• Image: Philstar.com

Writing in PNG's Catholic Reporter, Fr John Glynn of the We Care Foundation in Port Moresby pointed to United Nation's statistics that he called "terrifying in their implications".

Fr Glynn wrote that 45 per cent of PNG children have stunted growth due to their being malnourished almost from birth.

"It also means that their brains are undernourished and they do not reach their full level of mental ability," he wrote.

Fr Glynn also pointed to Australian and local research that showed 80 per cent of PNG people are "functionally illiterate and uneducated".

"Now we are told that almost half of our children are growing up physically and mentally retarded."

But Fr Glynn said that, of course, the suffering, malnourished children are not "our" children.

"They are not the children of the blessed 20 per cent of the population who are educated, employed and able to take care of themselves and share in the increasing wealth of this lucky country.

"The one child in 13 who dies before the age of 5, the 14 in every hundred who suffer from ‘wasting' diseases and die by the age of six or seven, and the rest who grow up physically and mentally retarded are the children of the 80 per cent of the population who are illiterate, uneducated and in many cases suffer from extreme poverty."

Fr Glynn said this situation should be completely intolerable and unacceptable to every thinking PNG citizen.

"There should be an outcry from every corner of the country for a war on poverty and ignorance.

"But, of course, this won't happen. The poor have no voice."

Such people are invisible in modern mainstream and social media, and so can be easily ignored, Fr Glynn lamented.

Source

• The Catholic Reporter
• Image: Save the Children

He called for greater efforts to build a worldwide "culture of encounter and solidarity".

The Pope's words came in his annual message for World Food Day, addressed to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome.

He called it "paradoxical" that globalisation is increasing the world's awareness of situations of need, yet there appears to be "a growing tendency towards individualism and inwardness, which leads to a certain attitude of indifference — at a personal, institutional and state level — towards those who die of hunger and suffer as a result of malnutrition".

"Something must change in us, in ourselves, in our mentality, in our societies," he said.

Pope Francis called the waste of food — which, according to the FAO, accounts for approximately a third of worldwide food production — "one of the fruits of the 'throwaway culture' that often sacrifices men and women to the idols of profit and consumption; a sad sign of the 'globalisation of indifference', which is slowly 'habituating' us to the suffering of others, as if it were something normal."

He said the tragic condition in which millions of hungry and malnourished people, including many children, live today is "one of the most serious challenges for humanity".

"It is a scandal," he said, "that there is still hunger and malnutrition in the world! Not only must we respond to immediate emergencies, but face together, at all levels, a problem that challenges our personal and social awareness, to bring about a just and lasting solution."

Pope Francis said education in solidarity and a lifestyle that rejects the "throwaway culture", placing each person and his or her dignity in the centre, must begin in the family.

Sources:

Vatican Insider

Catholic News Service

Vatican Information Service

Image: Wanted in Rome

"In today's world, I believe extreme poverty and inequality are unjustifiable and unfair, and that's why I am taking part. Live Below the Line demonstrates the problem in a concrete way, while raising money to address the problem," said Bishop Duckworth.

"As a family, we took part last year, and it was amazing how much time we spent thinking about food. It made us realise how much we take our abundance of food for granted. Because Live Below the Line is over five days, it connects us in solidarity with the poor. It is no easy task as you wrestle with what you are going to put on the plate every day. It is humbling to realise that this is the daily reality for more than 1.4bn people in our world living in extreme poverty."

Live Below the Line is an initiative of the Global Poverty Project, an education and campaigning organisation whose mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of people taking action against extreme poverty.

In 2012, Live Below the Line is running in New Zealand, the UK, Australia and the USA, with more than 20,000 people spending 5 days living below the line.

Last year, Global Poverty Project's Live Below the Line was held in NZ for the first time.

Source

• Scoop
• Image: Suff.co.nz

As many as 2,000 children are experiencing stunted growth and nearly 1,000 are acutely malnourished, said Andrew Scadding, director of the Thai Children's Trust, during an interview with Hanna Hindstrom from the Democratic Voice of Burma.

The UK-based NGO has provided food aid through local schools since 2010, but their money is running out. Global aid budgets are down and donors are redirecting much of their remaining funds into Burma's emerging market. Continue reading