Plight of the Unpeople: Give money to hungry not banks, says UN food chief

2009-11-19

Give money to hungry not banks, says UN food chief

The director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has questioned how world powers could put so much money into fighting the financial crisis and not feed the one billion hungry.

Jacques Diouf said a three-day summit in Rome "didn't go as far" as he had hoped. "If it has been possible to mobilise trillions of dollars to stimulate the global economy to combat the financial crisis, the world should be able to come up with resources to solve its hunger problem," he added.

The summit was labelled a failure at the outset when delegates from 192 nations rejected UN appeals to pledge $44bn (£26bn) annually in aid. The UN had hoped for a commitment to eradicate hunger by 2025.

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Vietnamese

"If you really want to get a sense of “what happened” in Vietnam ... just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you." - Nick Turse

America

“Everywhere I go, every town I visit, you don’t see any industries. You don’t see any factories. You don’t see anything. We don’t make anything. We are really the poorest country on earth, but people refuse to see that. We are only surviving. We are only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this force cannot go on forever. It should be so obvious that we’re only chugging along, bullying people into lending us money and sending us stuff that we don’t deserve, that we haven’t earned. How can we survive? Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been reduced to living like savages in this self-proclaimed greatest country on earth.” - Linh Dinh

Chagossians

"First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate." - David Vine writing about the ethnic cleansing of Diego Garcia

2009-11-19

Give money to hungry not banks, says UN food chief

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