Pope Francis urges concrete action in global nutrition challenge at UN conference in Rome

“When solidarity is lacking in one country, it's felt around the world,” the pontiff said according to an FAO statement.

He told delegates from the 172 nations attending the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) to make sure their pledges assure food security to all citizens are put into concrete practice, saying that the right to a healthy diet was about dignity, not charitable hand-outs.

Despite there being enough food for everyone, food issues are regularly subject to manipulated information, claims about national security, corruption and “teary-eyed” evocations of economic crisis, Francis said.

“That is the first challenge we need to overcome,” he said, urging that the rights of the human person need to be embedded in all aid and development programmes.

The fight against hunger and under-nutrition is being handicapped by “the priority of the market and the pre-eminence of profit, which have reduced food to a thing to be bought and sold, and subject to speculation,” the pontiff added.

He also highlighted the need to care for the environment and protect the planet. “Humans may forgive but nature does not,” he said, continuing: “We must care for Mother Nature, so that she does not respond with destruction,” flagging the upcoming UN climate conference in Lima, Peru COP20 (COP20) and France (COP21) as opportunities for doing so.

Global leaders on Wednesday approved the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and a Framework for Action, embracing voluntary principles aimed at addressing on Thursday's major nutrition challenges and identifying priorities for enhanced international cooperation on nutrition.

Among its priorities are to forge ways to tackle obesity, a growing global health problem even in lower-income countries, to combat micronutrient deficiencies that affect two billion people worldwide, and assure access of all people to healthy diets required for development.

“For the first time in history, humanity can say that misery is not fate and that hunger is completely avoidable,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said while introducing the pontiff.

Pope Francis has been an outspoken advocate for the poor, saying it is a “God-given right of everyone to have access to adequate food” and urging everyone to be more conscious of their “food choices,” including waste, to end the “global scandal” of hunger.

Earlier this month, the Pontiff wrote a letter to global leaders at the G-20 summit in Brisbane, citing malnutrition as the first of the problems they should seek to solve.

Queen Letizia of Spain, also speaking at ICN2, highlighted the “special importance” of women in ensuring family nutrition.

She also argued that in addition to the moral imperative of tackling hunger, there is an economic one. “Investing in better nutrition can raise productivity and economic growth, reduce health care costs and promote education,” she said.