BRUSSELS — There are plenty of summits to choose from this year, but the World Summit on Food Security deserves not to be lost in the crowd. This meeting in Rome from Monday to Wednesday provides badly needed political momentum to three linked issues that rank among the most challenging of the current era: food security, biodiversity and climate change.
Collectively, we are failing in the fight against world hunger. More than 1 billion people in the world today do not have enough food to meet their basic daily nutritional needs, and the situation in developing countries is getting worse.
This is, first and foremost, a moral outrage. How can it be that in the 21st century, when we have taken men to the moon and back, we still cannot feed everyone on this planet? Policymakers must recognize, moreover, that food insecurity is linked to the lasting effects of the economic crisis and ongoing climate change, and that it represents no less a threat to our global community.