Recovered harvests

Wasting food is “like stealing from tables of the poor,” Pope Francis told a UN World Environment Day audience. “A culture of waste… is despicable when many suffer from hunger.”

Care for the environment and reduce waste, he urged. A 10-point drop in stocks is a tragedy, “but that some homeless people die of cold on the streets is not news,” he noted. “Our grandparents were very careful not to throw leftover food,” Francis recalled.

“Play after you finish everything on your plate. Other children have nothing to eat.” That edict, from parents long gone, still resounds in our ears. We’re grandparents now. We cheer when Krsitin, 9, and Katarina, 6, prepare rice-cum-sardine packs for slum kids.

Over 3.9 million Filipinos went hungry, the March Social Weather Stations survey found. Worldwide, one in seven doesn’t get enough to eat, although the world can feed all. “There are people so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote.

Ironically a third of harvests is squandered. That’s a staggering 1.3 billion tons. Each American scraps 400 pounds of food in a year—“the weight of a young male gorilla,” Wall Street Journal reports. Consumers in rich countries junk as much food as sub-Saharan Africa produces.

Yearly, the Philippines loses a million metric tons of already-harvested rice due to several causes—from slipshod processing to shabby storage, Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala estimates. Cabbage spoilage mars a third of harvests, UP-Los Baños studies found. Fish losses crest at 40 percent.

A world of abundant food, cushioned by surplus stocks, large forest reserves, fishery grounds and croplands, is history. We razed forests, eroded vital top soil and decimated wildlife. Our profligacy handcuffed our grandchildren to a world where scarcities would be embedded.

Recovering what is frittered away is crucial. Five thousand ate and were filled from five loaves and two fish shared by a young boy, then multiplied by the Galilean. “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost,” the Master told his disciples. And they “filled twelve baskets.”

Even in a good year, we produce just about enough food to meet consumption needs. “We will need to produce 70 percent more food, by 2050, to feed the world’s expanding population,” Worldwatch Institute projects.

We must decisively curb onslaughts against systems that nurture life. Today’s fish kill replays the ravaging of critical top soil. Erosion blights over 52 percent of our croplands. We need to recover postharvest losses. “Ang  hindi  mapagtapon  ay  hindi  mangangailangan.” He who saves will not want.

Population here declined far slower than in other countries. Come 2020, Philippine population will surge to 111.7 million. Sea levels meanwhile are rising from warming. Arctic ice sheets are melting. Altered climate regimes will bug our world.

President Aquino’s integrity plus his reform efforts have curbed the free fall toward more misery. Standard & Poor’s upgraded the Philippines’ credit rating. That followed earlier upgrades by Fitch Ratings.

But more needs to be done. Unacceptable abortion rates, due to lack of family planning services, must be tamped down. And focusing on job creation is urgent. Would the Catholic bishops have thumbed down the Aquino regime if the President didn’t stand firm on the reproductive health bill? How many Filipino bishops live as simply as Francis?

The Pope’s plea for efforts to curb waste resonates. He excels at symbolism that spurs action, the New York Times notes. He lives in a two-room apartment, dresses in simple white and speaks in direct, colloquial language. “His symbolism has begun seeping into substance. He seeks a simpler church, more closely identified with the poor.”

“I left the flock decades ago” writes Jack Persico of the Guardian. “But this Pope Francis has been impressive from the start. He even had kind words for atheists, calling us allies to ‘defend the dignity of man,”’ fellow seekers of truth, goodness and beauty.

“If Francis continues to lead by example, not by fiat, he can show Catholics, Christians and nonbelievers alike that faith can deserve respect, and even make a difference. If not, he’ll blow his chance to speak with such conviction that even heathen might hear him. And that would truly be a sin,” Persico concludes his article.

Francis seeks to be shepherd, not overlord. The Catholic left and conservative right have set aside old arguments—for now. “The result is an outbreak of patience and generosity of spirit,” says Stephen Schneck of Catholic University.

“Whatever your view of Christianity, the example of Jesus remains one of history’s most surprising constants,” writes Michael Gerson in the Washington Post. He never wrote a  book. He spent three years teaching in an obscure corner of a vanished empire.

“(Yet, he) still stirs the deepest longings of the human heart. When we see his image even partially reflected in another human being, it appeals beyond every political division… and true authority returns.”

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