Pope Criticizes Food Price Speculators

Pope Benedict issued strong words on Friday against financial speculators spiking food prices and pointed to family-run farms as a way to help stave off world hunger.

“Nourishment is a factor which touches on the fundamental right to life,” the Pope said.

“How can we remain silent before the fact that food has become the object of speculation and is tied to the movements of financial markets which, lacking clear rules and moral principles, seem fixated on the single objective of profit?”

On the morning of July 1, Pope Benedict met at the Vatican with participants from the 37th conference for the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

He greeted the newly elected head of the organization, Jose Graziano da Silva, and thanked the outgoing president, Jacques Diouf, for his “competence and dedication.”

Pope Benedict said that global poverty, underdevelopment and hunger are often the result of “selfish attitudes” that come from the heart of man. This selfishness, he noted, finds “expression in his social activities, in economic relations and in the conditions of the market” and is eventually “translated into the denial of the primary right of all individuals” to be fed.

The Pope said that the instability of the global market and price increases in food “demand concrete responses, which must necessarily be united in order to achieve results which individual States cannot achieve alone.”

“This means that solidarity must become an essential criterion for all political and strategic action,” he said.

Pope Benedict also stressed the importance of the Food and Agriculture Organization continually re-examining its own structure so it can guarantee “nutritional development, the availability of food products and the development of rural areas, so as to ensure that humankind is free from hunger.” [more...]

SOURCE

Catholic News Agency