ABSTRACT: 1979: The Radical Party begins to mobilise against death from starvation in the world. Participating in the World Food Conference in Ottawa, Marco Pannella enunciates the original ideas which will be the basis of the international campaign for survival that will reach its apex in June 1981 with the Nobel Manifesto (doc. n.429): while all international agencies are committed to long and medium range projects, no one seems to be occupied with the urgent certainty that now, within 12 months, 50 million people will die of starvation, with the necessity of extraordinary emergency measures to protect the "absolute subjective right" to life.

(Discourse at the World Food Conference in Ottawa, September 1979, from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982

Mr. President of the World Food Conference, I thank you for the opportunity given to the delegation of European and Italian parliamentarians to participate as observers in the work of the Ottawa session, and I also thank the entire conference. We have come here because before making our decisions, our choices, it is necessary to be well informed, and one must learn what one doesn't know.

As of September 11, we, in our capacity as parliamentarians, will ask both the Italian Parliament and the Office of the President of the European Parliament to put on the agenda of an extraordinary September session of the respective assemblies the results of your work and the issue of starvation and the massacre it is increasingly causing in the world.

What is our problem, Mr. President and members of the Conference? "Food". Food for whom? This is the real problem. We are told that about 50 million people will die of hunger, or perhaps malnutrition too, during the year. We know too that the mortality rate will increase tremendously and ineluctably in the years, if not the months, to come. We know that the success of your work is absolutely essential that aims at guaranteeing the solution to the problem in the medium and long term as well: the reform of the world structures so that the massacre does not continue to be the sign of our times.

But we will allow ourselves to raise another problem also, to ask ourselves about it - and you too. The medium term will be here in the course of several years. In the meantime, if the figure of 50 million is correct, if there really are 17 million children who will die in the The Year of the Child, as the Ethiopian delegate tells us, then we ask: food for whom? Also for these, or only for those who manage to survive for three, four or five years? Shouldn't we take on the task of feeding those as well who in four, or ten years, day after day risk dying without having reached that medium term which, quite rightly, is being dealt with? Is it logical that international organisations provide for extraordinary emergency measures when a political crisis threatens to kill 10 or 10,000 people in some region or some country and that, on the other hand, nothing of the kind is provided for in the face of such a sinister forecast, that will become a sinister and monstrous prediction, of 50 million people who will d

ie in or during the next twelve months? Is it logical to believe that there exists a "Declaration of Human Rights" that is valid for man's liberty and his conscience but not for man's life? Is this not, perhaps, an absolute subjective right?

Do we find ourselves, as has been suggested, faced with a lack of projects, or have we not been lacking rather in the political will, up to now, to utilise the projects that exist? Are we not everywhere used to - I repeat, everywhere used to - the idea that in such and such a country there will be hunger and want until the time revolution or peace are not achieved? These are the questions we pose and, as far as we are concerned, we believe it is certainly no longer possible to live in a world where civilisation inculcates the dogma of the sacredness of life while we live through a year of massacres certainly far more extensive than the ones of the Forties, for which a civilised conscience reproved Nazism.

There were about 10 or 15 million dead pressing round the German people in the 30's and the beginning of the 40's. And the German people were reproved for not having acted at a time when there was no official news about Buchenwald and the other concentration camps. It was known, but it was not known officially. Now, instead, at the beginning of the year, UNICEF has told us that as of tomorrow 17 million children, 50 million people will die. We all know that the French President Giscard d'Estaing has himself proclaimed, recognised, admitted, prophesied, that only a fourteenth part of what we spend on armaments, hence against the so-called defence against death (against the enemy who is death) is spent against the true enemy that is killing today even while we are here speaking. So then we ask you - we laymen confronted with the truth which you know and of which you are the priests - we ask you to let us at least take action as of tomorrow.

I believe we must also know how to intervene at once. We have parliaments whose honour and whose future demand a pronouncement against this extermination. And we want to know how this is possible and what the projects are for today and not for tomorrow. It strikes us in some degree perverse to think about better nourishment for tomorrow, while in the meantime this attention, if unequivocal, would be an alibi of our consciences for the tens of millions of men and women who are dying. What can we do as of tomorrow, we who have the power, at least theoretically, to do something? What must the European Parliament, the Italian Parliament do?

We have assumed the responsibility of asking our country to provide not 0.07% but 2% of public aid. And ours is a country that itself knows unemployment and that, in certain parts of the South, stands at the borders of the hungering world, where people die of diseases caused by precisely by malnutrition. And yet we are going to ask our country to convert military service and servitude into emergency aid. Who else and where else will this request be made? What country will accept having this conversion of our activity - of national defence itself - immediately activated by infrastructures on its territory to save from hunger at once, if possible, all those who tomorrow we will be able to help thanks to the medium and long term projects?

We are honest enough to say that our actions are determined by certain political convictions. We think it would be healthy to recognise that what would appear to be almost an intellectual sacrilege to many men in this Eurocentric world - pauperism and absolute pauperisation - is a reality of this century and of these very years: the fact, that is, that people die of hunger in this century and in these very years, there where in past times they did not die of hunger. In all of this, for us, there is a class aspect: here too you can discern what the multi-nationals mean as a mortgage even on the powers of our governments, on our official powers in relation, at times, to the realisation of our will, of our good will. But evidently we cannot always think that we can go on saying that there is death wherever there is a murderer, when it would be technically possible to save someone and we do not save them; And yet there is a murder there, a genocide that is taking place.

Well then, we do not ask you to help us, we who know that we do not know, knowing that you know. We ask you to not be resigned to seeing that you good will and your good hopes remain shelved by the international powers that be; and that, contrarily, other projects that have no name and that do not proclaim themselves as such - the projects of the multi-nationals and of profits - manage to assert themselves in place of your needs.

As of the coming week in September we consider that our action as parliamentarians cannot remain a routine political action. Therefore we welcome the message of civilisation we receive from

a world that today more than any other is paying the price of this murderous disorder.

Being internationally established, we will undertake a new path following Gandhi's "Satyagraha" beginning on the same day that we set in motion the will and the regulations of our parliaments. A few of us will begin a hunger strike though it may even seem grotesque when compared to the hunger and the deaths of 50 million people. In our civilisation there are sometimes strange modes of mobilisation that connect the lives of a few of us to those of hundreds of thousand and even millions of that we can hope to save, that we must save. Perhaps our public opinion, perhaps our parliaments, perhaps our governments, in order to save the lives of a few of their own people, will decide to do something to save the lives of all the others.

Somehow all that is perverse and may appear monstrous, may appear a pretext, but we tell the delegates of the countries that are suffering from this established disorder, this mass murder - that are suffering from the incapacity or the unwillingness of the powers that be, of the international powers, to resolve these problems striking at them - we must tell them in all frankness that we have an extreme need of them, that solidarity is something solid.

We also try to be a few among the fifty million in the hope and the will to be represented by those here who, too often, must give way to the blackmail of the richest, or the ideological blackmail of those who maintain a good conscience at a cheap price in the name of yesterday's revolution and who, today, refuse to involve themselves effectively in the defence of life, making their food aid evidently depend on their most immediate political interests.

Mr. President and members of the conference, our profound thanks for your attention and we want you to know that there are some Italian and some European parliamentarians who today choose to represent those whom they call the poorest, those who should therefore be the richest in the willingness and the capacity to struggle.