“There aren’t sufficient resources for the developing countries, in particular in favour of agriculture, and the international community continues not to do enough”. This, on the eve of the World Food Summit, is the observation of George Gelber, public relations officer for Cafod, the aid agency founded by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in 1962 with the objective of helping the poorest countries to get out of the vicious circle of poverty. “The western world as a whole is not doing enough to alleviate hunger in the world and the FAO itself was forced to admit that the objective set by the summit in 1996 of halving the number of people suffering from hunger by 2015 will not be reached if their number continues to be reduced by the annual rate of only eight million per year”, explains Gelber. Thanks to the donations of the faithful of the Catholic Church of England and Wales, Cafod is sponsoring over a thousand projects in the poorest countries throughout the world. But it denounces the fact that that the resources to help the development of agriculture in the poorest countries are insufficient and that the governments of the European Union are also responsible for this situation. In Great Britain the situation is aggravated by the fact that the Commonwealth Development Corporation, an organization founded fifty years ago to aid the development of the poor countries and partially privatized in 1997, has begun to reduce its own grants in the agricultural sector and reallocate its funds to the commercial and mining sectors. The same organization, moreover, is closing many of its regional offices throughout Africa. According to Cafod, however, the proceeds of agriculture are a key resource for achieving the objective of halving the number of people reduced to famine by 2015. Cafod is also asking the international community to commit itself to a more equitable and more charitable world market.
