[LifeStyle] The hunger tails

[#Steeven.™]

As the bishop emeritus of Brazil, Pedro Casaldáliga, points out, hunger does not wait and the first thing to do with those who are hungry is to feed them

One more year, throughout these days a large operation is being carried out throughout Spain for the collection of food promoted by the Fesbal (Spanish Federation of Food Banks), which for this edition has proposed to exceed 450,000 kilos obtained last year. As the bishop emeritus of Brazil, Pedro Casaldáliga, points out, hunger does not wait and the first thing to do with those who are hungry is to feed them. Later all that of the cane will come, but above all to explain to him that the river is his.

Few things in life are as important as food, to the point that our life and evolution have depended on the ability to have enough food for us and ours, wherever we are. However, despite the formidable advances in food production, hunger has always been present in the history of mankind, until the number of people who suffer from it is quantified with astonishing normality, as when we count the number of possessors from mobile phones or cars.

We have ended up living with hunger as if it were an inevitable residue of our well-being, the result of situations of extreme poverty but also the consequence of human decisions and calculations through economic policies or destructive speculative practices. This is what has happened in Europe in the last decade at the hands of the harmful policies of expansive austerity applied, which have left a palpable trace of poverty, exclusion, inequality and also hunger, although less is said about it.

And it is that hunger and the problems that hundreds of thousands of people have in countries like Spain to obtain the daily food necessary to live is not talked about. We have become accustomed to seeing queues in front of soup kitchens and humanitarian organizations, scavengers in containers, food bags or campaigns to collect food with astonishing normality, without realizing their meaning. In addition, we have delegated the care of these people to charitable organizations, as if we wanted to remove them from public institutions and make their existence invisible. But it is enough to visit the parishes and soup kitchens to see how people crowd every day to be able to have a plate of food or get a bag of food to take home.

We are ashamed to certify that in countries like ours there are people who have problems eating, when what we should be ashamed of is that there are policies that generate people who do not have food, together with the lack of redistributive justice mechanisms. So we come to a halt, organizing extensive food drive drives, supposedly for people who can't get it, but we don't talk about those people and the reasons why they can't meet their essential needs.

Food is requested but it is not required to eliminate the causes that lead all these people to depend on donations to eat, thus ignoring the right to food, a right guaranteed by international treaties signed by Spain, one of whose obligations is to "comply with the right to food directly when there are individuals or groups unable to enjoy the right to food through the means available to them ”, as signed before the United Nations in August 2013. A basic human right at the same level as others essential rights, such as education, health or housing.

There is talk of the thousands of kilos of food obtained thanks to spontaneous contributions, without asking to reinforce the network of public social services or eliminate the policies that create misery, destroy jobs and allow starvation wages. Only employment and fair wages, together with comprehensive and effective social policies, will eliminate the poverty that forces so many citizens every day to turn to poor people's organizations to feed themselves, a figure that, according to research I have carried out, rises in Spain 1.29 million people a year.

Naturally, it is very easy to collaborate with a package of rice or macaroni, but the collection between individuals, even allowing food to be supplied to people who need it, does not exceed a level of precariousness, atomization and instability that tends to distort the understanding of the problem about the you want to act. In fact, these annual food collections represent a very small amount compared to the 96.4 million kilos per year of food that are distributed each year in Spain through the Spanish Agrarian Guarantee Fund (FEGA) and which make Spain the European country that receives the most food.

We have to ask ourselves if we want the distribution of food to become chronic in our country, transferring its responsibility to civil society and charitable organizations, or if we really want to abandon paternalistic and welfare thinking, defending the right to food and food sovereignty , requiring the participation of the beneficiaries in the distribution and distribution systems.

Now, the thousands of people who contribute with our small gesture of solidarity one day a year should also become aware that a collective and political response is necessary to first alleviate, and later eradicate, the queues of hunger in Spain.