Vatican City, Oct 16, 2007 / 07:39 am
Tonight 854 million people will go to bed with an empty stomach even though enough food was produced to feed everyone. Aware of this sad reality, Pope Benedict XVI marked today’s World Food Day by urging all countries to recognize food as a universal human right.
In his message, the Pope noted that the right to food was enshrined in the Universal of Declaration of Human Rights, a document adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
Yet, Benedict challenged, 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."
Despite food being made a right, all of the efforts made so far to guarantee the right to food throughout the world had failed to significantly reduce the number of hungry, Benedict said.