It's hard not to feel down about the state of the world. It's hard not to worry that things might get even worse.
War here, there and everywhere, climate change and natural disasters, and childish nonsense under the Capitol Dome, a structure that the world once look to for guidance and support.
President Michael D. Higgins has been looking into the future and what he sees is not very encouraging for countless millions of people across the globe
Higgins has never been afraid to speak his mind, even though his words can seemingly sometimes pour forth like water from a bottomless spring.
Higgins just addressed the Opening Session of the World Food Forum at the Headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. Ahead of his address to the opening session, Higgins delivered remarks at the 43rd annual observance of World Food Day at the same venue.
The events mark the commencement of a week-long program of engagements which the Irish president will undertake in Rome to coincide with the World Food Forum (WFF). Higgins will deliver the keynote address at the closing session of the WFF on Friday afternoon.
In an advance release, it was stated that - building on the addresses which President Higgins was invited to deliver in Senegal in January at the second Dakar summit on food sovereignty and food resilience - the president would, across his engagements in Rome, emphasize that in responding to the food security challenges which we face, it is essential to move past reactive emergency responses to tackling the underlying structural causes of hunger.
To deliver successful food systems, the president will suggest that we must recognize the links between food insecurity, global poverty, migration, debt and climate change.
Now that would be a challenge for some of the current denizens of the House of Representatives, in terms of overall concept, required attention span, even basic interest.
But our world is facing these issues whether we like it or not, ignore them or not.
In his address, Higgins warned that we are on the “verge of an abyss” as access to vital natural resources dwindle and hunger is used as a weapon of war.
“We could be at the verge of an abyss... and see our future in ever increasing expenditure on armaments rather than on the provision of food,” he said in the speech to the FAO.
The comments, according to an Irish Times report, echo those of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who last weekend warned the world was “on the verge of the abyss in the Middle East” and appealed for the release of hostages in Gaza and access for humanitarian aid.
President Higgins, according to the report, said it was vital “to look forward to a future of a peace” and “reject the suggestion that war is the natural condition of humanity."
The FAO event, the report added, is dedicated to highlighting the importance of fresh water for human life, and the ways it is threatened by unsustainable agriculture, urbanization, and climate change.
“We are at a perilous tipping point in relation to this precious resource,” President Higgins said.
“Competition for this priceless but depleting resource is increasing, and a water scarcity has now become an ever-increasing cause of conflict. Indeed hunger is becoming a weapon of war.”
Higgins warned that the current economic system is not sustainable and that young people would have to find a different way.
“We will have to say to them: You will have to do everything differently, including the interconnection between economics, society and agriculture.”
Higgins warned that fresh water resources had declined by twenty percent on a per capita basis in recent decades, and that water availability and quality was in decline due to “decades of abuse, poor use and management, over-extraction of groundwater, pollution and climate change."
He said: “Around 600 million people depend on aquatic food systems for a living. They, as we meet, are suffering the effects of pollution, ecosystem degradation, unsustainable practices and climate change, all based on economic assumptions that must be changed and questioned by all young people.
“Today is a day to renew our commitment to the conservation of our food resources... a world free from hunger, a just sustainable and harmonious existence on our vulnerable planet that is in peril.”
Higgins spoke these words and others in, as mentioned, Rome, the Eternal City.
Meanwhile in Washington, lately the infernal city, no audible words like this at all. We're in real trouble for sure.
