Holy See's FAO expert visits Britain

HUNGER: HOW TO HELP . .
Catholic Herald Reporter LONDON, Tuesday EIGHT days before the Duke of Edinburgh opens the Freedom from Hunger Campaign in the Royal Festival Hall, the Holy See's observer to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Mgr. L. Ligutti, sat down in London today to discuss aid for backward countries with 17 heads of missionary Orders and representatives of seven Catholic societies.
The Societies are all affiliated to the U.K. Committee of the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. Bishop Grant, Auxiliary of Northampton, attended for the Knights of St. Columba, while Bishop Craven, Auxiliary of. Westminster, represented Cardinal Godfrey. With them was Mgr. John Coonan, chaplain to overseas students.
The meeting, held in the Oratory Hall, was arranged by the Freedom from Hunger Campaign Committee of the Sword of the Spirit. Its purpose was to work out means of co-operating in projects for aiding underdeveloped countries.
REAL NEED
Insisting that world hunger is due, not to lack of resources, but to a lack of their development, Mgr. Ligutti called on missionary bodies for new vision in a changing situation.
He laid emphasis on the work they could do in their own districts and through their own contacts. "A lot of little people ;n a lot of little places doing a lot of little things is the real need", he said.
The international Freedom from Hunger Campaign has been under preparation for nearly two years since it was announced by Dr. B. R. Sen, director-general of F.A.O. The next three years will be devoted to focussing world attention on problems of hunger and poverty, with a view to a concerted effort to wipe them out by both short and long term measures.
Hunger, under-nutrition and malnutrition, with death, sickness and debility as a result, are the normal lot of millions of people in the world today. Some 30,000,000 peoples died directly or indirectly of under-nourishment last year, in this the most prosperous century of the world's history. Sober official estimates suggest that one in six of all the world's population goes to bed hungry every night. That means 400,000.000 people out of a total population which this month reached the 3,000,000,000 mark. Yet all the experts agree that the world has
sufficient resources to feed all its peoples and any foreseeable increase in their numbers.
Blessing the Freedom from Hunger Campaign, Pope John XXIII has said of it: "Consciences must be awakened to a sense of the responsibility that rests on the human community and on every individual, on the most privileged people especially. Nobody can nowadays offer the excuse, in a world where distances count for nothing, that he is unaware of the needs of his faraway brother, or that it is not his job to help him. We are all collectively responsible for the under-nourished."