David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I sat next to him at a meeting last week at which the Society of St. Vincent de Paul launched its report on poverty in Ireland. It made the point that on hunger in this country that the proportion of income spent on food is much higher among the poorer. If that is true in a wealthy country like Ireland, how devastatingly more true must it be in the more disadvantaged parts of the world? As the Minister of State said in his contribution, we in Ireland are in a particular position to appreciate that, and the point was made in the report that all of us have been touched by the ancestral memory of the famine. One of the striking images in Dublin is the famine memorial near the Custom House. In my own family, even though there were fairly substantial people on my mother's side — in 1845 they had very considerable land holdings in County Laois — after the famine they were reduced to a few hundred acres. An entire generation was wiped out because they refused to take rents and they caught famine fever. I know, therefore, from the memory in my own family, how devastating the impact of the famine was and we need to bear that memory in mind imaginatively when we confront the situation in the world.

I share Senator Ormonde's concern that something should be done about this problem and I echo her words. I do not believe it will be done. Even in this House there is not the passionate concern. There is not a crowded chamber with people giving vent to utter horror at the scale of what is going on. We have not woken up yet to the complete scale of the matter. We are not alone in that. That is universal.

The report points out that governments consistently give grandiose commitments in front of the television cameras and then fail to live up to them. That is a scandal. There should be a form of index rating. Every time a government gives a commitment in these areas that they will help fellow human beings in their most dire suffering, we should monitor them and they should be exposed for not doing it and held up to the court of world opinion.

There are ways in which this problem could be dealt with. Very large sums of money might be needed but we only have to look at the squandering of money on armaments. That could be a source of revenue to deal with part of this problem.

I welcome the one brief mention of population in the report but it is not enough. Very few people do; it is the elephant in the room. It is the aspect that underlies so many of our problems, be it resources, the use of fossil fuel, water, international conflict, overcrowding and the increase in world commodity prices. The population of this small planet has doubled since I did my leaving certificate. Some 860 million people are at the most critical level of poverty. The number of people at that level has increased by more than 860 million during my lifetime. If that increase had not taken place, perhaps we would be in a better position to confront this problem. Nothing can be done until the underlying problem of this planet's gross overpopulation, the extent of which is continuing to increase, is directly confronted. We cannot cope with this exponential increase. I do not mean to be Scrooge-like about it. I do not want people to die so that the planet's surplus population can decrease. However, we must reflect on the impact of overpopulation on human resources, animal life, the extinction of species and global warming. We need to examine the population explosion in the context of any examination of world hunger.

The problem to which I refer is found not just in some of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, but also in countries such as Sudan. It is obscene that the Government of Sudan, which is racked by famine from time to time, is selling its best arable lands to Arab investors so that the considerable crop yield of such lands can be exported. Does that echo in this Chamber? I refer to 1847, when food was exported from this country in the face of the starving people. The Government of Sudan is doing the same thing to its population this minute, as we speak. People said "never again" after the Famine, but the events about which we say "never again" tend to happen repeatedly. We are refusing to learn lessons. We have not heard a peep from our so-called spiritual leaders, some of whom, particularly in the Vatican, have suggested we should breed more people. I do not understand such an attitude. They suggest that there are plenty of resources which, if managed correctly, could feed an amount of people 18 times the current population of the world. While such a model might apply in theory, we would have a totally depleted quality of life if we had to stand shoulder to shoulder in wretched and miserably overcrowded conditions.

Other Senators have spoken about genetically modified food. I am on the same wavelength as Prince Charles of the neighbouring island in this regard. When he was in India recently, he quite rightly spoke out against Monsanto's production of genetically modified crops in that country by quoting Mahatma Gandhi's line about commerce without morality. He mentioned that there has been a rash of suicides among Indian farmers who were disappointed by the yields arising from genetically modified crops. We are always told that such crops are much better, but that is not true in the case of Monsanto's genetically modified form of cotton, known as bollgard. I presume the bollgard crop was developed to repel the boll weevil. We are aware that such crops tend to invade and contaminate neighbouring fields.

The human motivation behind Monsanto's behaviour is ruthless and naked greed. Some people believe that greed is fine. Margaret Thatcher and others told us that "greed is good". It was good for a limited period, but we need to look at the mess it has got us into now. The financial systems of the western world cannot cope with the aftermath of unbridled greed.

Is it appropriate for a multinational corporation to colonise the choices of individual farmers in countries such as India? I was glad to hear Prince Charles saying something I have been saying for a long time. The comments I have made to defend myself against some of the scientists in Trinity College, for example, have been unpopular. I will continue to say such things because I believe they are true. Even if the scientific merits of genetically modified crops were proven beyond doubt, it would be politically and commercially valuable for Ireland, as an island, to retain its GM-free status as a significant marketing ploy. I was interested to hear Prince Charles suggest that it would be wise and prudent, as a precautionary principle in case some disaster occurs as a result of genetic modification, to ensure some part of the world is kept free of genetically modified crops.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence to suggest it is more efficient to generate foodstuffs from crops that are properly managed with respect for the environment. I refer to organic crops, in particular. Professor Bob Watson, who led the world's biggest agricultural study of this area, showed that organic farming techniques in Brazil increased yields by 250%. The study came to the conclusion that this kind of environmentally friendly farming represented a much better solution than the production of genetically modified crops.

I welcome the report of the Hunger Task Force. It is a good report. It is important to mention that Ban Ki-moon has indicated that a further 100 million people have been affected by these problems since the start of the food crisis. The United Nations millennium development goals now comprise something of a catalogue of shame. The first goal is to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day. This involves reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger, the prevalence of underweight children under the age of five and the percentage of the world's population below the minimum level of dietary energy consumption. These aims are quite modest because they would leave hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable people in the world, women and children included, in the unenviable categories I mentioned. Although the report mentions that there has been a slight percentage decrease in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, if one examines the figures one will appreciate that there has been an actual arithmetical increase in the number of human beings suffering from poverty in such areas. Even though our aims in this regard are quite modest, as I have suggested, we have not achieved them.

Another absolute catalogue of shame is outlined on page 5 of this report. We have all made promises, but have we lived up to them? No. Just five developed countries have reached the target of 0.7% of gross national income. We are moving towards it but we have not got there. I hope we do. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs which has been pushing for it. My colleagues on all sides of the committee, including those on the Government side who represent Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, have joined me in that regard. Why have we not got there yet? The UN's hunger target under the millennium development goals is unlikely to be met in sub-Saharan Africa or south Asia. The more ambitious target set by the World Food Summit will not be met. The official development assistance commitments agreed at the G8 summit at Gleneagles are unlikely to be met. Just five African states have met the target that was set at that summit, which is appalling. It is catastrophic. We need to take the strongest possible measures.

As Senator Ormonde said, 2 billion people in developing countries suffer from anaemia. The former Senator, Mary Henry, who has visited such areas, told us all that the simplest medical intervention could prevent anaemia at a minimal cost. We have not done that, however. There is an impact on education. Children cannot concentrate if they have hunger in their bellies. They are sometimes too weak to get to school. That is what we are facing. If one examines the graphs in the report — I appreciate that they cannot be reproduced in the Official Report — one will see that there has been a staggering Alpine leap in the graph depicting world commodity prices. Other graphs relate to global grain consumption and the question of population, which no one will tackle. The wealthy countries are resorting to bio-fuels. We thought that was the answer, but that attempt to atone for our greed for fuel resources has had an impact on the food crisis.