IRELAND: Eradicating world hunger was "a soluble problem" provided the political will was there to tackle it, the former US senator and onetime presidential candidate, Mr George McGovern, said in Dublin yesterday.
Mr McGovern, whose ancestors hailed from Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, was speaking at a press conference on the Jeanie Johnston replica famine ship to mark the beginning of a meeting of the World Food Programme, described as the world's largest humanitarian agency.
"I played a role in the launching of this organisation in 1962. I was sent to Rome by President Kennedy and I made the first offer on behalf of the US that led to the creation of the WFP."
He recalled that eight years ago the international community committed itself at a conference, also held in Rome, to reducing the number of chronically hungry people in the world from 800 million to 400 million by 2015.
"I come here sad to tell you that we have actually added 60 million people to the hunger rolls since that conference. So one of the reasons for this conference is to see what we can do to shift the car into high gear, to get moving.
"We are going to have to recognise that hunger is a soluble problem. We know how to grow the food, process and distribute it. What is lacking is the political will." Passing resolutions was not enough: "You have to attach that dream to some concrete vehicle." He called for the provision of free school meals by the UN to the world's 300 million hungry schoolchildren.
The figures could be reduced by a further 100 to 150 million by providing nutritional supplements to low-income pregnant and nursing women and their infants. "Let's start with hungry kids and their mothers," Mr McGovern said. "We're all so well fed now we don't think much about the hunger problem in the world, but it's out there."
One of the purposes of the WFP conference was "to get our heads together and see if we can figure out more effective ways to stir up political support for feeding the hungry".
He never had a chance to discuss the issue with President Bush. "If John Kerry gets elected, the first thing I am going to do is ask for an appointment to talk about this problem," he said.
In a message to the conference Mr Nelson Mandela said world agricultural subsidies were "fundamentally immoral". For every dollar rich nations spent on official development aid, they spent six dollars on agricultural subsidies which undermined that aid.
Hunger was a moral issue, he said. "These societies have decided to spend huge sums of money to protect their own. The message is clear - my farmers count, yours do not."