Yet, according to the last FAO report, current agricultural output could feed 12 billion people, about twice the population of the planet, providing each person with 2,700 calories a day. But this is not done. For that reason, when a child dies of hunger anywhere in the world, it is because he or she has been murdered.
Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, hits us with fist-like data. He intends to awaken humanity, which he says has been “expelled from its own history”.
"Persuaded by impatient teachers,” Bertolt Brecht wrote in the mid-20th century, “the poor hear that this is the best of all worlds and that the leak in their bedroom ceiling has been foreseen by God Himself…"
"Neoliberalism,” Ziegler completes in the 21st century, “pretends economic laws are natural laws, that the world market is not directed by men but rather by an invisible hand…”
After enumerating in a poem all the possible kinds of doubts, Brecht emphasized one of epic contours, one that has left its mark in history:
"The most beautiful of all doubts is when the weak and discouraged raise their heads and stop believing in their oppressors’ strength…"
Jean Ziegler makes a gloomy diagnosis in his last book: "Neoliberalism and globalization are our daily terror, the law of the jungle and the denial of history as we knew it… the republic, human rights, universal suffrage -- that is to say, those institutions of irrevocable character that built our world -- are attacked today, crumbled by what I call the ‘empire of shame’: an oligarchic conglomerate of transcontinental private companies…"
And after the diagnosis, like Brecht, like so many others, he tunes his ear, sharpens his political sensitivity, and gives us a ray of hope:
"Marx said that a revolutionary must be able to hear the grass grow. And the grass grows, even if the United Nations is devastated by North American cynicism and their concepts of preventive war, permitted torture, et cetera. All of this despite the fact the national states are assaulted by the IMF, the WTO, liberalization and uncontrolled privatization. Oh well, in spite of all of that, social movements arise, brand new, unheard of…"
"It is no longer about an ideology which is Marxist or not. It is, simply, the insurrection of the moral imperative of Kant, who tells us that when a world works through the exploitation of the other, when the well-being of some is paid for with the misery and blood of multitudes, this is a finished world and it must be rejected…"
The thing is… Jean Ziegler can also hear the grass grow.
MS/HG
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