Food, sustainability and ecological responsibility: hunger as the negation of human rights

摘要

What will future generations think of our current lifestyle, of our unbridled consumption of food and energy and, on the other hand, our inexcusable degree of responsibility for hunger? How is it possible that we are now capable of producing enough food for all of humanity and that, at the same time, tens of thousands of people are allowed to die every day? Will we go lazily on shunning reality, submerged in passivity and oblivious to the havoc wreaked by virulent poverty ? Undoubtedly periods of worsening crisis - ecological, environmental and economic- like the present, aside from their inherent and manifest negativity, represent a real opportunity to examine and question fundamental aspects of our growth model, as well as to revise ways of usingnatural resources and means of coexistence that have been in practice until now. For that reason the goal of the present talk is to deal with some of the key elements explaining and demonstrating the reasons for the unviability of the present model of development, while at the same time correcting the domination that has historically characterized western man's relationship to nature. Which, besides its seamlessly integrated progress, generates so much hunger and misery everywhere. So it is that the only dwelling suitable for hunger must be the museum of history, definitively forming part of an atavistic past, burdened down by inequality and a biting injustice. Nonetheless, to ensure that this proposal become effective, the problem has to be rethought,but beyond political and economic thinking, or eminently technical analysis chained to instrumental rationality. And thus, as J. Habermas insists, the suitable framework properly corresponds to the sphere of moral responsibility. And one of the unavoidable questions is 'How can we surpass the anthropocentrism of an ethics that excludes from the circle of its recipients mute nature and creatures capable of suffering, but who lack language'?