Speech by President Higgins on acceptance of the ‘Concern Worldwide/Fr. Aengus Finucane Award for Services to Humanity’
Áras an Uachtaráin , 17th January 2014
Fior Chaoin Fáilte … Míle buíochas …
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to Áras an Uachtaráin. May I extend my sincere thanks to Dominic MacSorley and all of you from Concern Worldwide, for presenting me with the ‘Concern Worldwide/Fr. Aengus Finucane Award for Services to Humanity.’
I receive this honour with gratitude and humility. I take it as an acknowledgement, not just of my work, but also, and above all, as recognition of the extraordinary achievements and dedication of so many individuals, NGO workers, missionaries and others, who are committed to the cause of poverty alleviation and global justice. I place any efforts of mine as one would place a stone on a cairn.
As President of Ireland I am proud to represent people that continue to value the importance of the humanitarian spirit. The global space in which Concern Worldwide and other Irish NGOs operates is a deeply challenging one, but it is undoubtedly a space where Ireland has made a real contribution and has a distinct voice, and it has been a real, positive, and enduring contribution to Ireland’s reputation.
I had the great privilege of knowing Fr. Aengus Finucane, and I met Jack Finucane in Somalia. Fr. Aengus Finucane was a truly inspirational figure. He had just completed his Masters in Development Studies at the University of Wales when the Biafran conflict broke out and he was a leader in the group of people who came together to see what assistance they could give as urgent humanitarian relief.
The Biafran conflict was a terrible war with appalling human suffering which motivated a strong and sustained Irish missionary engagement, especially from members of the Holy Ghost order, of whom my brother-in-law the late Fr. Pat Coyne was a member, like a number of his cousins – Fr. Paddy Conway (Sierra Leone), Fr. Tadhg Lynch (who was in Africa but is now back in Kimmage). The Holy Ghost order worked among the Igbo people of Biafra, and they were the first to respond to famine and conflict among the people they served.
The images of that period became emblematic of the plight of the African continent for a generation. Sadly, each decade throws up its own defining images of human suffering, and the need for organisations such as Concern Worldwide, and for inspirational voices like Fr. Aengus’s, has increased rather than abated over the years.
The areas of international development and global justice are fields of action in which I have had an interest throughout my life, including during my ten years writing for Hot Press, from 1982 to 1992, which I frequently used as a diary piece on these issues.
I can recall being in Buswells Hotel in 1980 when the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt presented his famous report on International Development issues and the great sense of excitement that then arose from the prospect of seeing the developed world contributing more actively to improving the lives of the developing world’s populations. Brandt then wrote:
“A new century nears, and with it the prospects of a new civilization. Could we not begin to lay the basis for that new community with reasonable relations among all people and nations, and to build a world in which sharing, justice, freedom and peace might prevail.”
I was then Chair of the Labour Party and we were the first to sign the report.
We are now well into that new century envisaged by Willy Brandt over 30 years ago, and while some and remarkable progress has been made in several areas of international development, global hunger remains as the grossest violation of the most basic human right, the single greatest moral challenge facing the global community in our twenty-first century.
The International economic order has not changed in such a way as to eliminate global poverty or deliver a just global trade or economic order.
As most of you know very well, the source of hunger today is not lack of food, but poverty created and sustained by stark inequalities across the world: disparities of climate; inequalities of political, economic and technological power. Indeed only about 10% of deaths from hunger are the result of armed conflicts, natural catastrophes or exceptional climatic conditions. The other 90% – the overwhelming bulk – are the product of long term chronic lack of access to adequate food. This represents the great ethical failure of the current global economic, social and political system.
It is of course important to acknowledge the significant gains in poverty alleviation witnessed throughout the world over the past two decades, notably in countries such as Brazil and India. During my recent visits to Central and South America I have seen evidence of new thinking and fresh approaches which are reducing poverty while also reducing inequality.
I know also from my travels throughout Africa, that given the right opportunities, communities can find innovative and appropriate solutions to their own problems. There is no doubt that both the image and the reality of much of Africa has changed dramatically in the last decade. In Ethiopia, for example, the proportion of underweight children has fallen by 10%, while in Malawi the number of households with insufficient food has fallen by 20%. These are real and meaningful progress.
The African continent’s economic growth rates are stronger than ever, and the prospects of more equal and sustainable development are perhaps better now than at any time since the early hope-filled years of decolonization.
And yet, as many African countries reach middle-income status, over one in four Africans remains undernourished. The vital question, then, is as to whether the gains accumulated from economic growth are or will be sufficiently distributed to improve people’s living conditions over the medium to long term and, more particularly, to reduce widespread malnutrition. This is a goal which lies at the heart of Concern’s action since its very foundation.
One very significant development for which I know Concern was to the forefront is the tackling of childhood malnutrition through an approach initially designated as “Community-Based Therapeutic Care” (CTC), and now called the “Community Managed Acute Malnutrition” (CMAM). This has been revolutionary, notably thanks to the production of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, which makes the safe treatment of severely malnourished patients at home feasible. CMAM is now promoted as best practice by the UN and a growing number of Ministries of Health and aid agencies.
According to the FAO, there are three central reasons why malnutrition remains such a challenge worldwide. These are the neglect of small-holder agriculture, the global economic recession and the significant increase in food prices which have placed food out of reach for so many of the world’s poor.
In the speech I gave to the “Hunger, Nutrition, Climate Justice” Conference, in Dublin, last April, I mentioned the remarkable phenomenon revealed by an index of the prices of 33 commodities, ranging from copper and aluminium to soybeans, coffee and cotton, from 1900 to 2010: for a hundred years to just after 2000, commodity prices fell by on average 1.2% per annum, amounting to an overall reduction over the century of 70%. But in the last ten years that entire one hundred year fall in price has been erased, by a surge in prices almost twice as great as that which occurred during the Second World War.
At the most basic level, global consciousness has not yet engaged the contradiction between our compassionate instincts and the structures of narrow interests it chooses to support, through silent indifference, or even collusion. It seems to me that speculation in food commodities is a dramatic illustration of this contradiction.
In my speech at that Dublin conference, I also emphasised how climate change presents another complex layer of challenges to the tragedy of malnutrition. Climate change is not an abstract phenomenon featuring in arcane science journals. It is present everywhere and perhaps most harshly and adversely in environments where people are least equipped to meet its force and ill effects – and least responsible for its causes.
It is the poor and marginalised who are more at risk from natural disasters because they eke out their livelihoods in fragile environments: in situations of conflict; in drought-prone areas; in swamps and flood-prone riverbanks of congested urban settlements.
One of the most difficult challenges facing policy makers, therefore, is to devise sustainable solutions that take account of the relationship between water, food and energy – of their connectedness. Within this relationship are changing patterns of land holding and acquisition, and the diversion of land use from food production to fuel provision.
This question of the structure of land ownership is, I believe, of crucial importance. It stands at the interface of the interrelated challenges posed by malnutrition and climate change.
According to the International Land Coalition:
“Corrupt practices, behind-the-door negotiations, illegal evictions of traditional land-owners and violence against community are all common features of the current phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions.”[1]
This phenomenon has come to be designated by the phrase “land-grabbing.” And the lack of any supranational regulating or monitoring mechanism for land acquisitions has enabled the acreage of transnational land acquisitions to rise from 15 – 20 million hectares in 2009 to more than 70 million in 2012.
It is therefore essential that we recognise, and draw practical consequences from, the particular vulnerability of smallholder farmers, pastoralists and fishing communities. Faced with shrinking productive resources, they are on the frontline of shocks and extreme weather events which are having a direct impact on their livelihoods and food security.
It is also important to bear in mind that among those small holders and landless people who suffer from hunger and malnutrition, it is women and girls living in rural areas who are most affected.
This means developing new programmes and policies that are responsive to women’s realities and their needs as carers and breadwinners. I agree with the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, whom I met here:
“Food security strategies”, he said, “should be judged on their ability to challenge gender roles and to truly empower women. Gender sensitivity is important, but it is not a substitute for empowerment.”
I know that such sensitivity to the gender dimension of poverty was central to Fr. Finucane’s thinking and action, he who saw the education of girls as a foundation for the future well-being of families, and that these conceptions remain central to Concern Worldwide’s current action.
May I, once again, thank all of you who work with Concern for everything you do to support the lives of the poorest people across 26 countries in the world. I want to thank you for the respect you show for their dignity, for your acknowledgment of their capacities.
Your long serving patron, Seamus Heaney, perhaps put it best when he wrote of Concern, that:
“It stands as a magnificent answer to all the negative thoughts conjured up by the words Biafra, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sudan, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, to all the dismaying facts about the materialism of the developed world that causes our belief in the reality of disinterested efforts and altruistic vision to falter.”
I am deeply grateful to you for this award, I am honoured to receive it and I wish you and your colleagues, both in Ireland and across the globe, every best wish in your important mission.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.
[1] Niasse, M. 2012. A World of Science.10 (2), p.15.