Dear to the Brazilian president, this program aims to reach half a billion people by 2030, by giving an international dimension to the fight against hunger and inequality.
This was the“central objective” from the brazilian presidency of the G20 for Lula, a former factory worker born into a poor family: Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty was launched on Monday November 18, with 82 signatory countries. “It is up to those around this table to urgently eradicate this scourge that shames humanity.”declared Brazilian head of state Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the leaders of the world’s most powerful economies gathered for the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro. “This alliance is born at the G20, but it is global. Let this summit be marked by the courage to act”.he added.
The Global Alliance Against Hunger has a total of 148 members: in addition to the signatory nations, the European Union, the African Union, 24 international organizations, nine financial institutions and 31 NGOs have also joined the group. Argentina, the only G20 country not on the list of signatories at the time of the launch, joined shortly afterwards.
The project is ambitious: to reach half a billion people by 2030, giving an international dimension to the fight against hunger and inequality. But the challenge is gigantic, considering that 733 million people suffered from hunger in 2023, i.e. 9% of the world’s population, according to the latest report presented in July by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other UN agencies.
Free school canteens
“Hunger is not due to shortages or natural phenomena (…), it is the fruit of political decisions that perpetuate the exclusion of a large part of humanity”Lula thundered. The Alliance aims to unite efforts to free up financial resources or replicate initiatives that work locally. “I thank President Lula for creating the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. Germany was the first G20 country to join this initiative and today, in Rio, other major economies have joined us. This is an important sign”.reacted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a message in Portuguese on the X social network.
Among the concrete commitments already made, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced on Friday a contribution of $25 billion to finance programmes “to accelerate progress in the fight against hunger and poverty from 2025 to 2030”. In particular, the Alliance claims to focus on programs to support nutrition in early childhood, free canteens in schools and support for small-scale farmers. With programs to increase the number of free meals in schools in poor countries alone, the aim is to reach 150 million children by 2030.
The Nigerian government, which already has the largest school meals program in Africa, has pledged to double the number of beneficiaries, from 10 to 20 million children, by sourcing food from small local farmers. Indonesia, meanwhile, will launch a new free canteen program in January 2025, with the aim of reaching 78.3 million schoolchildren by 2029.
“Going further”
In a message read by Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, who represented him in Rio, Pope Francis welcomed the global coalition: “Immediate and decisive action is needed to eradicate this scourge”. This Alliance “could be a turning point” but “it must go further” at “responding urgently to the devastating impacts of climate change on food systems in the Global South”.reacted the NGO Oxfam in a press release.
For Lula, the fight against poverty is a personal battle. As a child, he experienced hunger in his native state of Pernambuco (north-east Brazil), before moving with his family to the industrial metropolis of Sao Paulo, where he worked for many years as a lathe-mill operator and became a well-known trade union leader. His social programs had lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty during his first two terms in office (2003-2010), thanks in particular to the Bolsa Familia, an allowance paid to the poorest families on condition that their children attended school. At the time, however, he was benefiting from the commodities boom, while his government has been under much tighter budgetary constraints since its return to power in January 2023.