Wednesday 10 December 2014

Henry Kissinger Forty Years Later

On December 10th 1974 Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, addressed the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome and the term 'food security' was used for the first time.

In his speech Kissinger said ‘‘’the profound promise of our era is that for the first time we may have the technical capacity to free mankind from the scourge of hunger. Therefore, today we must proclaim a bold objective that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for the next day’s bread, and that no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition’’.

Four decades have passed since then and one out of seven people go to bed hungry. Kissinger’s promise has never been fulfilled and instead the situation is getting worse and we cannot imagine what the situation will be in 2050 when the world population is expected to reach 9 billion people
.

Exactly three months after the Rome conference ( in March 1975) Henry Kissinger engineered the ill-fated treaty between the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein to put an end to the Kurdish revolt in Iraqi Kurdistan and we all know what followed that treaty. 

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