Matters India Reporter
New Delhi: Several food rights activists in India have applauded a Vatican official’s call to rebuild the world’s food systems to make it more resilient, inclusive and sustainable.
“We have the potential to embark on this journey together, taking this unique Covid crisis as a unique opportunity,” asserted Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
The Ghanian cardinal spoke at the second of a three-part webinar the Vatican organized by the Vatican on May 26 ahead of a high level UN Food Systems Pre-Summit gathering in Rome in July.
The webinar held under the title, “Food Justice: Jobs, innovation, and finance at the service of food justice.”
“Thanks to Cardinal Turkson for reiterating Jesus’s vision for an equalitarian society,” says Jesuit Father Irudhaya Jothi, a food rights activist in India’s West Bengal state.
Biraj Patnaik, the former principal advisor to the Supreme Court in the right to food case, welcomed the cardinal asserting the right to food as an inalienable right.
“Indeed, Cardinal Turkson is very interested in these issues and is the points person of the Pope on the right to food,” Patnaik told Matters India.
According to him, the UN is running a major food systems summit and the Vatican does comment on the right to food on such occasions.
“The UN food systems summit is at an opportune moment as the world needs a fundamental reset post-pandemic. Covid 19 has shown us that the world cannot sustain itself at the current levels of inequality,” he added.
Cardinal Turkson had stressed the urgent need to re-imagine and re-build food systems, so they “may become more resilient, inclusive and sustainable.” This is not an “impossible enterprise,” he added.
According to him, “the lack of food is inextricably linked with other social struggles, aggravated by the pandemic.”
Poverty, marginalization, lack of democratic political processes, conflict, environmental destruction and biodiversity loss, and the consequences of climate change all contribute to food insecurity, increase inequalities and worsen the conditions of vulnerable communities worldwide, weakening an already broken global food system, the Vatican official explained.
The webinar series entitled, “Food for Life, Food Justice, Food for All,” involved the Vatican’s Permanent Mission to Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development and World Food Program.
Participants included a number of high-level experts who addressed the need for a new development paradigm and reinforced the call for an integral ecology promoted by Pope Francis in the encyclical Laudato Si’.
Among the aims of the seminar is to contribute to current global discussions about a just and sustainable post-Covid recovery, with proposals and suggestions for the action plan that will be discussed at the pre-UN Food Systems Summit.
Sister Sujata Jena, a food rights activist based in Bhubaneswar, expressed happiness that Cardinal Turkson emphasized the urgent need to food security.
“At a time when global leaders are discussing vaccination, the cardinal’s concern on food security is very pertinent to developing countries like India,” the lawyer nun told Matters India.
The member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary says food justice originated as one of Jesus’s first ministries. “When he saw the crowd, he had compassion on them. He said to his disciples, give them something to eat. Mark 6:37,” she said quoting from the Bible.
The hunger watch survey revealed that nearly 38 percent respondents said their consumption of rice/wheat had decreased while 40.7 percent said their pulse intake had come down and 57.6 percent said they eat less vegetable now.
Father Jothi too says Jesus was a great food activist first and foremost. The multiplication of loaves and fishes and setting up of the table fellowship are in this line of food activism, he asserted.
According to him, the pandemic has caused severe hunger and malnutrition among the poor, migrants, daily wage earners, who form the majority in the Indian population.