Statement by President Higgins on World Food Day 2024
Date: Wed 16th Oct, 2024 | 15:22
“On today, World Food Day, I welcome the Oxfam report, ‘Food Wars: Conflict, Hunger and Globalization’, and in particular the manner in which it combines all the different elements that flow from hunger, including the connection between hunger and conflict.
This is unfortunately exceptional in much of the discourse, where the role of such issues as eliminating global hunger is discussed neither in the discussion of migration nor in relation to avoidable conflicts.
Current projections, as reported in the Global Hunger Index 2024 published last week by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, have found that it would take another 136 years to eliminate global hunger at the present rate of tackling the problem.
The Oxfam report highlights a number of food-and-conflict disasters, including those in Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as in Gaza.
The report rightly notes that UN Security Council Resolution 2417, adopted in 2018, condemned intentional starvation as a war crime, yet notes that there is not yet accountabilities for such ‘starvation crimes’.
I agree with those conclusion, but I would go further and say that there is a need for the international community to respond to the new forms of warfare which now involve the destruction of the possibilities of habitation as a new war crime that stands on its own.
The value of Oxfam’s report is also shown in its linking of displacement to hunger and conflict. On World Food Day, it is striking how the connection between such issues of hunger is entirely absent from the European discourse at the highest level.
The reluctance of acknowledging the connection between extractive economic policies that have a disastrous social, economic and ecological consequence is now an established characteristic of the European discussion. The recent proposals on migrant hubs have the capacity to do irrecoverable damage to the human rights discourse in its refusal to see that what is a headage practice of farming out what is an unanalysed phenomenon – migration – shows not only a concerning dearth of policy.
The connection between the consequences of climate change, the debt service burden, conflict and unfair terms of trade are the starting point for any meaningful discussion of migration.
Reports such as that of Oxfam remind us of the distance between the current policy discourse, scholarship on all of these issues, and indeed the moral instincts of people who believe it is possible to have a connection between economics, social justice and ecology that will serve all of humanity in its diverse circumstances.”