This was the “central objective” of the Brazilian presidency of the G20 for Lula, a former worker born into a poor family: the Global Alliance against hunger and poverty was launched on Monday, with 82 signatory countries.
“It is up to those around this table to have the urgent task of eradicating this plague that shames humanity,” declared Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the assembled leaders of the most powerful economies on the planet. for the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro.
“This alliance is born at the G20, but it is global. May this summit be marked by the courage to act,” he added.
The Global Alliance Against Hunger has a total of 148 members: beyond the signatory nations, the European Union, the African Union, 24 international organizations, nine financial institutions and 31 NGOs have also joined this group.
Argentina, the only G20 country absent from the list of signatories at the time of the launch, joined shortly after, according to a Brazilian government source.
The project is ambitious: reaching half a million people by 2030, giving an international dimension to the fight against hunger and inequalities.
But the challenge is gigantic, if we take into account that 733 million people suffered from hunger in 2023, or 9% of the world’s population, according to the latest report presented in July by the United Nations. Food and Agriculture (FAO) and other UN agencies.
“Hunger is not due to shortages or natural phenomena (…), it is the fruit of political decisions which perpetuate the exclusion of a large part of humanity,” thundered Lula.
The Global Alliance Against Hunger aims to unite efforts in order to generate financial resources or replicate initiatives that work locally.
“This is not just another forum for discussion, it is a practical mechanism to channel knowledge and funding in an effective way to reach those who need it most,” explains Wellington Dias, Brazilian Minister of Development. social, cited in the press release on the launch of the Alliance.
– Free canteens –
Among the concrete commitments already made, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced Friday a contribution of $25 billion to finance programs “to accelerate progress in the fight against hunger and poverty from 2025 to 2030” .
The Alliance claims in particular to emphasize programs to help with nutrition in early childhood, free canteens in schools and support for small farmers.
With programs to increase the number of free meals in schools in poor countries alone, the goal is to reach 150 million children by 2030.
The Nigerian government, which already has the largest school meals program in Africa, has committed to doubling the number of beneficiaries, from 10 to 20 million children, by obtaining supplies in particular from small local farmers.
Indonesia, for its part, will launch a new free canteen program in January 2025, which aims to reach 78.3 million school children in 2029.
This Alliance “could be a turning point” but “it must go further” by “urgently responding to the devastating impacts of climate change on the food systems of the Global South”, reacted the NGO Oxfam in a press release.
– Combat personnel –
For Lula, the fight against poverty is a personal fight. As a child, he himself experienced hunger in his native state of Pernambuco (north-east), before leaving with his family for the industrial metropolis Sao Paulo, where he worked for a long time as a turner-miller and became known as a union leader.
In July, when presenting the outlines of the Global Alliance against Hunger before a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Rio, he was moved to tears as he spoke of “the most degrading of human deprivations”.
His social programs helped lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty during his first two mandates (2003-2010), notably thanks to the Bolsa Familia, an allowance paid to the poorest families on condition that the children attend school.
But he then benefited from the boom in raw materials, while his government has been subject to much greater budgetary constraints since its return to power in January 2023.
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