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Starving children
Everyday about 24,000 people die of hunger, malnutrition and their related illnesses; 18,000 of them are children. This means about 170,000 people every week, 700,000 every month, about 9 million people every year.

This daily death count is due only to a very small extent to the emergency situations of war or famine. Dying of hunger is a consequence of the chronic malnutrition that marks the daily life of a billion people.

Even when malnutrition is not the direct cause of these people's death, it still causes general physical weakness, it debilitates the immune system and it makes them, and children especially, vulnerable to diseases that are deadly because the right drugs are not available in these countries as their price is too high. Undernourishment produces inadequate physical or mental development.

More than 200 million children are simply used to "living" in such a situation.

The fatted calves
The real problem is not the inadequate production of food, as some GMO supporters try to convince us, but the unequal distribution as well as the waste of available resources. Present food production is actually enough to feed everybody in every part of the world.
The cattle, swine and poultry which are industrially bred for human consumption, consume 145 million tons of cereals and soy-beans every year. Only 21 million tons are converted into food for people (eggs, steaks, etc.) whereas the remaining 124 million tons are just used as "fuel". This is because each animal has to eat and "burn" calories or food in order to grow and to carry on its own vital functions. A calf needs 13 kilos of vegetable food to gain only 1 kilo in weight! The 124 million tons of cereals employed every year to feed animals, and so removed from the direct feeding of human beings, could provide an extra cup of rice every day, all year round, for each human being on the planet.

The Western World uses animal products in an immoderate, useless and foolish way while at the same time it wastes the resources that would be enough to feed all the people on the planet.

In addition to this, industrial livestock production is a great consumer of water, a resource that becomes more precious every day. 31,000 cubic metres of water are necessary to produce one ton of beef, while only 450 cubic metres of water are necessary to produce one ton of cereals.

Cereal production in many Third World conuntries has increased, but only to be exported and then used as food for industrial livestock production. The cereal is changed into tons of meat which is the most important component in the unbalanced diet of the Northern part of the world. While in rich countries nowadays the main healthcare problems are linked to obesity and all kinds of disease related to the overconsumption and the excessive use of animal products, poor countries are deprived of all the vegetable proteins they could use to ensure the survival of their children.

Extensive livestock breeding gives rise to a further problematical situation: one hectare of land, in one year, yields 2500 kg of vegetable protein when soy-beans are cultivated; as grazing land it yields only 200 kg of protein as bovine meat. This makes the complete inefficiency of extensive livestock breeding self-evident.

This inefficiency, together with the ever increasing consumption of animal-based food, contributes to the desertification of the planet. In fact in most poor countries, every year new land is converted to grazing so that millions of hectares of forests are destroyed along with their biodiversity. The only aim of these activities is to breed cattle in order to export meat.

A global food plan should consider these facts and try to correct this imbalance. Any other approach would be a purely demagogical one.

The FAO
Over the last few years the Food and Agricultural Organization has systematically failed to reach its goals. In 1974, opening the World Food Conference, Henry Kissinger solemnly declared, "...within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, [...] no family will fear for its next day bread and [...] no human being's future and well being will be stunted by malnutrition". On that occasion the FAO launched projects that should have increased food production so that millions and millions of people in the world would be rid of hunger definitively. About 30 years went by but the plans did not achieve their goal, and what is worse, the difference between rich countries and poor countries became bigger and bigger. The FAO encouraged agricultural production for export, thus increasing the economic instability of poor countries which became totally dependent on the fluctuations of international markets. The FAO promoted the use of raw materials (seeds, fertilizers and machinery) which supported the agrobusiness of multinationals more than the agricultural and economical development of poor countries. As a consequence, it increased their dependence and debt. As far as social, economic and environmental questions are concerned, the FAO has failed in its own task. It has imposed methods, technologies, commercial laws and interests which were convenient to the Northern Hemisphere and the wretched elite of the Third World, while systematically ignoring the culture and interests of developing countries.

Such development projects have produced ruinous effects from the social as well as the environmental point of view. Increasing monocultures cut down the number of genetic varieties and make them more vulnerable to parasites, with the consequent increased use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, a huge waste of water, as well as soil and water pollution. The export of edible products has reduced the amount of food available to the local population. The need to acquire raw materials and technologies has induced a huge number of small farmers to lose their land; it has increased poverty, social tensions, conflict and migration towards rich northern countries. Thus the rich countries have been the original cause of this migration, and now they would like to drive it back. They close their borders not only to solidarity, but also to the analysis of their own responsibility.

Individual and joint social responsibilities
Our responsibility must go beyond mere necessary and direct solidarity, beyond a warm welcome to people coming from poor countries, beyond an increased economical support to developing countries: our responsibility must create projects involving all of us "privileged" citizens of this planet. Countless scientific surveys prove that our food habits and our habitual overconsumption are directly responsible for the death of millions of human beings.

People in affluent nations must reduce their consumption of meat and other animal-based food. This is a necessary condition, even if not sufficient to save millions of human beings from starvation.

Of what use is the present food system? On one hand it starves the poorer populations while on the other it causes death through heart attacks and other obesity connected diseases. To which reason does it answer? Whose interests does it protect?

No project can be reasonably elaborated if it fails to take into account the role of 'energy consumer' played by Western nations. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute of Washington, in twenty years one thousand three hundred million people will experience hunger and die of starvation annualy. Such an alarming perspective should induce the FAO to look for new solutions in order to achieve its objectives.

Towards an equal distribution of resources
The following analysis seems to be acceptable: the resources exist; not everybody can take advantage of them because of their unequal distribution; vegetable products are used to fatten livestock, with an enormous loss of energy; in poor countries farmers who grow vegetable crops cannot consume them directly, and what is more, they are so poor that they cannot buy food. If this is true, it is urgently necessary to launch a Global Project whose aim must be to modify the food consumption and the agricultural policy management of the affluent nations and at the same time to develop a different way of managing the supporting policy towards poor countries and all its connected projects.

Suitable interventions in the affluent countries are the following:
· information and alimentary education activities in order to reduce meat and animal based-food consumption;

· the promotion of a vegetarian diet by offering vegetarian meal choices in all public canteens;

· an end to the current policy which gives generous funds to livestock breeders; an agricultural policy aimed at: lessening the number of animals bred in order to reduce imports of food for animals, and converting zootechnical activities to organic vegetal protein cultivation.

Poor countries should:
· reduce the export of cereals and soy, as well as the extension of grazing ground;

· start agricultural projects in order to increase the production of vegetable based food (cereals, pulses, nuts, seaweeds, and so on), foods rich in protein and other nourishing components for local human consumption.

· avoid new projects for exporting cattle-breeding techniques or promoting feeding systems rich in animal-based foods.