Food day?

World Food Day. That may sound odd to those of us who take food for granted.

Vatican Information Service’s news release today repeated Pope Benedict’s jarring reminder that a lot of the world’s people are hungry, but giving them food is not just a matter of charity. It’s a matter of justice.

Since VIS is a bit behind online, here’s what my press update said:

Benedict XVI has written a Message to Jacques Diouf, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the occasion of World Food Day, an annual event organized by the FAO every October 16.

With the theme chosen for this year’s Day, “the right to food,” writes the Holy Father in his message, the FAO “is inviting the international community to face up to one of the most serious challenges of our time: freeing from hunger millions of human beings, whose lives are in danger because of a lack of daily bread.”

“We must realize that the efforts made thus far do not seem to have significantly diminished the number of hungry people in the world,” the Pope observes, “despite the fact that everyone recognizes that food is a primary right. … The available data shows that the lack of fulfillment of the right to food is due not only to natural causes but, above all, to situations provoked by human behavior which lead to a generalized social, economic and human deterioration.”

I see articles like this, and read them with appreciation for the gravity of the topic, but concern for how they’re received.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, for his part, said in a message: “We need to do far more to place the integrity and rights of every human being at the centre of all our efforts.

“The world has the resources, the knowledge and the tools to make the right to food a reality for all,” Ban said.

A week of World Food Day activities, with the theme “The Right to Food: Make It Happen,” will mark the 62nd anniversary of the FAO’s founding.

More than 150 countries have organised events for the occasion, including a “Run for Food” on Sunday in Rome.

Okay, so 62 years of efforts to reduce or eliminate world hunger, with annual observances like this, has to be good for making a difference. But beyond the events of the day, how much difference do they make in the day to day problem for individual human persons?

The FAO laments that despite the 1996 World Food Summit’s pledge to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015, the number of hungry people continues to rise.

“Keeping the summit pledge would require reducing the number of undernourished by 31 million every year until 2015, whereas the number of hungry is currently climbing at the rate of some four million a year,” the FAO said when it released the 2006 report on the state of world food insecurity.

Benedict, as usual, stated it more clearly, VIS reported.

The Pope goes on to recall how “an ever greater number of people – because of poverty or bloody conflicts – find themselves obliged to abandon their homes and their loved ones in order to seek sustenance outside their own lands, Despite international agreements, many of them are rejected” he adds, highlighting the “pressing” need for a concrete undertaking in which “all members of society, both in the individual and the international spheres, feel committed to cooperating in order to make the right to food possible.” The lack of fulfillment of this right, he says, “constitutes an evident violation of human dignity and of the rights deriving therefrom.” (emphasis added)

In other words, DO something to make it happen.

“The Catholic Church,” he concludes, “feels closely involved … in this task and, through her various institutions, wishes to continue collaboration in order to support the desires and hopes of those individuals and peoples towards whom the activity of the FAO is directed.”

Here are a couple of ways to help support desires and hopes.