Pope: Global Warming Will Not Starve the World

by Katherine Gustafson · 2009-11-20 06:00:00 UTC
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Monday, on the opening day of the World Summit on Food Security, Pope Benedict XVI tried to put the panic about global-warming-induced food crises to rest.

According to the UK's Times Online, the Pope said that the Earth can produce enough for everyone despite the ravages climate change might inflict. It is greed, he said, that has driven up prices and increased hunger in the world.

His remarks emphasized that food should not be treated like any other commodity, especially because "there is no cause and effect relationship between population growth and hunger." Nobel Prize-winning economic Amartya Sen has long commented that hunger is not a problem of production but one of access.

As such, the world needs a broader perspective on both environmental issues and food security, one that accounts for all the costs of producing food — environmental as well as financial — and adamantly refuses to see hunger as a built-in, though regrettable, part of a certain socio-economic system.

"Food production methods impose upon us the need to carefully analyse the relationship between development and environmental protection," the Pope said. "The desire to possess and to use in an excessive and disorderly manner the resources of the planet is the number one cause of environmental damage."

The Pope has a lot of faith (exactly!) that the world will be able to shoulder the burden of millions more humans despite the looming environmental crisis. Do you agree with this optimistic assessment?

Photo courtesy of roblisameehan via flickr

Katherine Gustafson
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