REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE GORTA WORLD FOOD DAY CONFERENCE ‘UNITED AGAINST HUNGER’
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE GORTA WORLD FOOD DAY CONFERENCE ‘UNITED AGAINST HUNGER’ FRIDAY, 15TH OCTOBER, 2010
Dia dhíbh go léir. I am very pleased to join you at this conference to mark the
30th anniversary of International World Food Day. I would like as Patron to pay tribute to Gorta for so faithfully marking this special day every year and thank the dynamic and tireless Brian Hanratty for his kind invitation to address you today. The theme of this year’s conference ‘United Against Hunger’ highlights the simple truth that banishing hunger from our world is not a one person operation, nor will it be accomplished by spectators. It is a huge task, not an impossible or insuperable task, just a huge task and like all huge tasks it needs a team effort in order to be successful.
Here in Ireland we will today throw out tons of excess food. It will be almost thoughtlessly put into bins or dumps because we are a culture that for the most part has plenty to eat, despite all our current economic problems. Our grandparents and great grandparents remember a different Ireland where it was a very difficult daily struggle to put food on the table and their parents and grandparents remember an Ireland where a million people died from the simple want of food.
Elsewhere in our world today many of our fellow human beings are not just dying from hunger but living miserably and painfully with starvation, their lives and their deaths a dreadful indictment of the extent to which those to whom they look for leadership and help have failed to get to grips with this most basic of human problems. It was the Irish nationalist Thomas Meagher who first uttered those haunting words ‘The sword of famine is less sparing than the bayonet of the soldier’. In Ireland, bitter historical experience introduced us early to the problems of food security and food supply. As a first world nation with a third world memory and in particular that memory of utterly unnecessary mass starvation, we have long understood that a sustained global meitheal is necessary if we are to make a real change to the levels of hunger and malnutrition that are paralysing life in so many countries and cultures today.
Thanks to advocates and champions like Gorta we know how insidious big things are like climate change, population growth, the growing urbanisation of global society, the capriciousness of the food commodities markets. These big things impact in a radical and unwelcome way in the lives of the poor but they are often too remote from where the levers of power and change are pulled to have a significant impact.
Ten years after the adoption of the first and most urgent Millennium Development Goal, to halve poverty and hunger by 2015, almost a billion people are suffering the brutal daily anguish of crop failures, food shortages and endemic hunger, some of it caused by natural disasters, more of it caused by human carelessness and corruption and a collective global failure to find and deliver workable solutions.
On this International Day of Rural Women, we remember that poverty and disease impact gravely and more cruelly on women and children. Women in the Third World perform up to 80% of farm work but often have very limited control over the farm assets with their rights of ownership severely restricted in many countries by social norms and customs and in some cases by legislation. Resolving global hunger means getting involved in helping rural women who are key nurturers and providers of family nutrition, they are in fact the basic building block. Malnutrition during pregnancy and in the first two years of a child’s life renders children profoundly vulnerable to irreversible physical and mental damage. That critical window of 1,000 days in the early life of a child is our opportunity to make the changes which change the odds. The "1,000 Day Change a Life, Change the Future" initiative launched jointly by Ireland and the US in September of this year is a good start towards shifting those odds in favour of the poor child and the poor mother.
It was at that launch that our country was described, in front of leaders from across the globe, as the ‘world’s leader in working to harness public and private resources in the fight against hunger, and now under-nutrition’. Strong words and a strong reputation to live up to. Samuel Johnson once said ‘Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.’ Gorta has been doing our perseverance for us over many years. It has been the hands of the work of our hearts, the outward expression of our care and our responsibility for the poor of the world. I particularly commend the Gorta volunteers, those quiet, unassuming heroes and heroines whose quiet efforts here at home raise vital funds to save the lives of strangers who are members of our common human family.
I would like to acknowledge Pat McGrath of PM Group for leading the way in ensuring that the business community plays its part in fighting world hunger. PM Group’s assistance in providing vital support to Gorta as they develop a major centre for Social Change and Development in Tamil Nadu, India and their commitment to the promotion of sustainable development in the Third World, are being recognised today by the presentation of a special Global Corporate Social Responsibility Award to Pat.
I congratulate him and his colleagues on their outstanding dedication and leadership.
I know you are all here today because you believe that it is not beyond the ingenuity and capacity of mankind to feed the world by working coherently together. You have a shared dream of a world that could if it had the will and if it took the action, end world hunger once and for all. It was Yeats who said – “In dreams begins responsibility”. Gorta takes responsibility and at this conference it asks others to do the same so that we can gather a meitheal strong enough, big enough, to bring a regular harvest of food to where it is needed most. We look forward so much to that day.
Thank you,
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.