(996 parole totali presenti in questo testo)
(743 letture)   

To the General Director of the FAO, Dr. Jacques Diouf
To the President of the European Commission, Dr. Romano Prodi
To the Italian Premier, Mr. Silvio Berlusconi

AGAINST HUNGER, A DIFFERENT DIET IS POSSIBLE
The undersigned citizens, associations, representatives of the cultural and scientific worlds concerned and outraged for the endless slaughter of millions of human beings caused every year by hunger, despite an increased production of food and while a part of the world is increasingly affected by diseases due to an excess of food intake
GIVEN THAT
· every year about 9,000,000 people are victims of hunger and that chronic malnutrition is the life condition of about one billion;

· around the world, food is produced in sufficient quantities to feed everyone, but it is still not equally distributed, often resulting in a great waste of existing food resources;

· women are among the majority of hunger victims and that their role is fundamental in nutritional choices and in the preservation of animal and vegetal bio-diversity;

· every year about 145 million tons of cereals and soy are devoted to cattle feeding, resulting in a loss of around 80% of nutritional potential;

· the indiscriminate exploitation of resources, especially water, is a serious menace for the planet and for its own survival and that intensive breeding is an activity that requires a higher water consumption in comparison to other food productions. Intensive breeding requires 70 times more water than vegetable farming to produce the same amount of food, (a ton of beef meat requires 31,500 cubic meters of water compared to the 450 needed for a ton of cereals);

· any tillable area produces more than 10 times the amount of proteins as a source of cereals and beans for direct human consumption rather than being destined to pasture or to the production of cattle food (one hectare of land, if cultivated with soy, can yield 2500kg of vegetal protein a year, while, when used as pasture, it yields only 200 kg of proteins through beef meat);

· setting out new land areas for pasture and the spread of monocultures in many southern countries causes a loss of bio-diversity and the risk of increasing desertification;

· the populations of rich countries suffer health problems due to an unbalanced diet and excessive consumption of animal fat and the emergencies connected to animal food productions keep growing in number and entity;

· intensive breeding causes suffering and death for millions of animals, sensible beings treated as commodities and forced to an unnatural and often cruel life;
CONSIDERING THAT
· the efforts to reduce hunger have so far been a failure and that the goals set in the first World Food Conference are even more far-off than thirty years ago;

· some of the solutions that have been adopted have resulted in even weaker and unstable economies for the recipient countries forcing them to depend on international market fluctuation and on multinational companies for the supply of seeds, fertilizers and machinery;
RECKONING THAT
· the consumption and the diet of rich countries causes the destruction of many lands, the waste of precious resources, the sufferance of millions of animals, the death by hunger and malnutrition of millions of human beings;

· the reduction of meat consumption in the Western world is a necessary, even if not sufficient, condition to avoid the death by hunger of millions of people;

· the promotion and/or the preservation of a vegetarian based diet among the poorest Countries can provide food for a higher number of people.
IN AGREEMENT WITH THE GOALS, CONTENTS AND REQUESTS OF THE Global Hunger Alliance

WE ASK
To the FAO, to the European Union, to the Italian Government, the launching of a global Project aimed at the food consumption of rich Countries and on their agricultural policies, while, at the same time, orienting the aid policies and the relative projects directed towards poor Countries. In particular, we ask:

the European Union and the economically developed countries:

· the promotion of food education and information campaigns aimed to the reduction of meat and animal products consumption;

· the promotion of vegetarian diet and the recognition of the right to the vegetarian option in public catering;

· to reconsider, in the horizon of the PAC reform, the production subsidy policy in order to discourage intensive breeding finalized to its gradual abandoning;

· to reconsider the legislative choices regarding Genetically Modified Organisms in accordance to the precaution principle;

· the implementation of an agricultural policy aimed at the reduction of breed animals so to diminish the need to import animal feedstuff;

· the launching of support actions for converting zootechnic activities into agricultural activities yielding biological vegetal proteins;
to the FAO and the developing Countries:

· the initiation of projects that reduce the areas destined to the production of cereal and soy for export as well as those used for pasture, working to maintain local dietary models and the biodiversity of vegetable production while emphasizing the importance of the role of women in dietary choices;

· the promotion of projects aimed to the cultivation of vegetable foodstuffs (cereals, beans, oil seeds, sea weeds, etc.) rich in protein and nutritious substances for local human consumption;

· the discouragement and the condemnation of economic operations through which highly polluting intensive zootechnics are relocated to countries with less stringent laws regarding social rights, environment preservation and animal protection;

Furthermore we ask the constitution of a specific Commission, with the participation of members of the NGO promoting the present appeal, with the duty to formulate proposals and concrete projects to obtain the goals presented above.

The proposal has been electronically signed by almost 1000 subjects (people and groups) and delivered to the FAO after the summit of June 2002. At the moment we are thinking to represent the proposal during or after the High-Level Conference on World Food Security of June 2008. Read the News on the homepage for further informations.