Thought For The Day: Radio 4 12th April

Copyright - BBC

12th April 2008
Rob Marshall.
Good morning.
The price of wheat has doubled in the past year. The price of rice has risen an astonishing 75% in the last two months.

People are drawing a connection between affordable food and social stability. Food riots have already broken out in Haiti, India and Mexico. There are chronic food shortages in many countries.

The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick (Zellick), says that “while many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs.” The fight against poverty has been put back 7 years.

Assessing Britain’s economic downturn against an international backdrop of widespread hunger and malnutrition is both sobering and challenging. Can it really be true that we actually throw away one third of the food we purchase every week – mainly because we buy too much in the first place and then let it go out of date?

I felt appalled by this statistic. I next opened my fridge in shame. Realising that I really was seduced by elaborate packaging, special offers and was locked into a culture of purchasing without thought which suddenly seemed enormously naive – yes, even disgraceful.
In the Old Testament, a famine is always a suggestion that things are not right in creation: that imbalances need to be sorted out. Faith responds by focussing on the common good rather than on individual greed; on the will of God rather than the priorities of wayward humanity.

James Martin, in his recent book, The Meaning of the 21st Century, urges political and financial initiatives to build up food reserves to tide populations over during dry and difficult spells. This, he refers to, as food security.

Achieving food security on a global scale can be tackled at many different but equally important levels. It starts, of course, with an individual acknowledgement that this is a serious issue which we should all be aware of and respond to accordingly.

As the World Bank and the IMF meet in Washington this weekend, there’s an urgency in finding the political and financial will to deal with the escalating numbers hungry people and the misery of poor.

In about the 8th Century BC, the prophet Isaiah surveyed the miserable imbalances in society and conveyed God’s message which is just as appropriate today: “What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the face of the poor?” It remains a fair question.