Go back almost half a century – in 1961 the member governments of the United Nations talked of there being no child going to bed hungry within 10 years. Ten years ago, at the World Food Summit, the talk was of ‘halving the number’ of hungry people in 20 years – one in two hungry children would have to stay that way in 2015. The UN has now announced that based on the current trend, we will be lucky if one hungry child in four will go to bed no longer hungry. The longer we wait, the more distant the goal becomes.

It does not have be this way!! It could have been different with a little effort – keeping promises made for development aid, setting trade rules that really help poor people to feed themselves, providing debt relief for governments to reduce poverty in their own countries, encouraging developing countries to adopt policies to promote agriculture and rural development. Canada promised 0.7% of our national income for relief and development aid, reached 0.5% in 1990 and has now backtracked to 0.3%. Our government has betrayed Canadians’ interest to help those hungry children.

Our government will work hard to avoid the shame of this failure. They are sending only a low level delegation to this 10th anniversary of the World Food Summit. Perhaps the calculation of Canadian politics considers that ‘no one will notice’. For those of you who want speak out, this is a time to be heard. This miserable result is a shame for all countries but we must start with our own.

Some actions you can take:

1. Letter to Your Newspaper – write a letter to the editor your local newspaper speaking of our government’s broken promise. We have included some key facts that you can use in the box above. Delivery it either Wednesday or Thursday and you are more likely to make it into the Saturday paper when people have more time to read.
2. Call your Member of Parliament – ask your MP to raise the question in Parliament as to why the Canadian government has walked away from its promises to the hungry of the world. You can find their contact details here.

Some quick messages that you may want to include:

• Canada joined 190 other countries in promising to reduce the number of hungry people by half by 2015. The Canadian government developed an Action Plan to achieve Canada’s part but the plan was never implemented.
• Canadian Aid for agricultural and rural development, a vital part of reducing hunger, was reduced drastically during the 1990s and has only begun to increase over the past two years. Further increases will make a difference but they will take time to take effect and that time is running out and will need to be support the small farmers that often make up 65-75 % of developing country populations.
• Canadian food aid, the first response to acute hunger crises, has been cut back steadily over the past decade from 400,000 tonnes in 1996 to 200,000 tonnes in 2004.
• Canada has worked at the World Trade Organization to whittle down any developing country proposals to trade rules that favour their small farmers and the critical role they play in building local food security.

Stuart Clark