A farmer casts fertilizer on a rice farm in San Carlos, Venezuela. Development and Peace is heading to Rio next June in hopes of nudging the world into a more sustainable food system. Photo by Carlos Garcia / Reuters, CNS.CCODP heads off to Rio Earth Summit next year
By Michael Swan
The Catholic Register
TORONTO (CCN)--The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace believes Canadians may be eating the planet to death, so they’re going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to nudge the world into a whole new food system.
Next June the United Nations Development Program will host Rio+20, a conference aimed at evaluating progress since the landmark Rio Earth Summit of 1992. CCODP is one of several Catholic organizations planning to attend.
“For us, responsible care of the planet is part of our campaign. It’s part of our five-year theme. We see it as a priority issue,” said program officer Mary Durran.
With delegations from CELAM, the central organization for Latin American conferences of bishops; SECAM, the African co-operative for bishops’ conferences; and CIDSE, representing the Catholic development agencies of Europe plus Canada; CCODP plans to push the conference to concentrate on agricultural policy.
“Sustainable, small-scale, ecological agriculture can actually help lessen greenhouse gas emissions, apart from the fact that small-scale agriculture is the best way to provide food for the poor,” said Durran.
CCODP is a signatory to the “Rio+20: Time to Act” statement, which has so far attracted the support of about 200 NGOs. The statement declares governments should support small-scale farming and break up the world’s largest agri-businesses.
“Industrial food production is a key cause of environmental and social harm and needs urgently to be reduced in size and impact. The solution is smaller-scale ecological food production systems,” says the eight-page manifesto.
In addition to promoting small-scale agriculture, the declaration excoriates the diet of North American and European consumers.
“The average adult in an OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) country eats an unnecessary and unhealthy extra meal each day (roughly an extra 750 calories). About 25 per cent of the energy and water – and the associated greenhouse gas produced – goes to waste food.
“At least 50 per cent of OECD adults are overweight or obese. Obesity costs the OECD states almost $300 billion per year – an amount that is more than enough to meet all the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, with about $100 billion left over,” says the Time To Act declaration.
The Rio conference is exactly where CCODP should be, said Dennis Patrick O’Hara, a theology professor at Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College.
“You can’t have healthy people on a sick planet,” said O’Hara, who also directs the Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology, in an e-mail to The Catholic Register.
“If we continue to compromise the health of the planet we will continue to compromise the sustainability of humans.”
Getting involved internationally with global food production fits with CCODP’s historic commitment to helping peasant farmers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, said Simon Appolloni, a former CCODP staffer working on his PhD in environment and religion.
“If we do not address – and wholeheartedly at that – the present and real threat of climate change, any pretensions to Christian solidarity are merely empty deeds or words, and ultimately fruitless,” said Appolloni in an e-mail.
“It’s not that new,” said Durran. “We have always said to people, ‘Live sustainably.’”
