Global Recession Is Affecting the World Food Program
The silence of global media has fallen over the implementation of the commitments made by countries within the scope of the UN World Food Program, which was established a decade ago to face the food crisis affecting a growing share of the world population. The lack of news over the last year is problematic. Although these are unilateral commitments by UN members and are at best forms of soft law, media gave the World Food Program attention until mid-2007. Also, job applicants to international development agencies, including the World Bank, were interviewed on the content and reach of the World Food Program. Fishing for data, one finds a telling figure: given the billions and billions of dollars spent to rescue banks and counter the financial crisis, the original $12.3 billion pledged to fight world hunger are being downscaled because of the macroeconomic difficulties many donor countries are facing.
What can be done to reduce to a minimum the likelihood of another crisis as damaging as this one? Jacques Attali, George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz, i.e. a grand commis, a global financier and philantropist, and a Nobel economist, respectively, concur on a fairer distribution of income and wealth as the main preventive measure to be taken in order to avoid the recurrence of a world recession. A less unequal income distribution would obviate the need to take on large quantities of debt (which is then repackaged and sold by others on global financial markets) to finance primary needs.
This would be a forward-looking policy to be collectively decided and widely implemented at the international level, along with the reforms in global governance listed by the recent UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development. However, the political mechanisms leading to a collective framework orienting individual economic decision-making and self-interest have yet to be found. Recent UN reports are not even making the news, but they say the governments of donor countries are suspending the implementation of the program to feed the world's hungry. The World Food Program was launched long before the global recession to guarantee one of the four fundamental freedoms listed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941: freedom from want.