World Food Day

World Food Day is celebrated on October 16, and every year a theme related to global food problems is chosen, and strategies to solve these problems are developed. In 2008, the theme was "World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy".

By celebrating the World Food Day, FAO provides an occasion to once again highlight the plight of 923 million undernourished people in the world. Most of them live in rural areas where their main source of income is the agricultural sector. Global warming and the biofuel boom are now threatening to push the number of hungry even higher in the decades to come.

Run For Food

Climate change and bioenergy are the focus of this year’s World Food Day activities, involving over 150 countries. They include a third edition of the popular Run for Food to take place in Rome on 19 October involving over 4 000 people, with a similar event to be held simultaneously in Milan.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon will participate together with Jacques Diouf and the Heads of other UN Agencies in a World Food Day ceremony at the United Nations in New York on 23 October.

Social Justice

Pope Benedict XVI, in a message read at the ceremony by Monsignor Renato Volante, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to FAO, said that a lasting solution to hunger in the world lay in the promotion of an international order based on social justice.The world produced enough food to feed a growing population, he noted. If people went hungry, it was partly because of a “race for consumption” which “imposes forced reductions on the nutritional capacity of the world’s poorest regions”. Other reasons included lack of political will by nations but also “runaway speculation”, together with “corruption in public life or again growing investments in weapons and sophisticated military technologies to the detriment of people’s primary needs...” “An essential condition for increasing production, safeguarding the identity of indigenous populations as well as peace and security in the world is to guarantee access to land, thus helping agricultural labourers and promoting their rights,” the Pope added.