62 DEVELOPMENT
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
Fernando de La Vieter Nobre, MD, PHD. Founder and President of AMI
Foundation (Portuguese NGO) Professor of Humanitarian Medicine at the
Medical School of the University of Lisbon, General Surgeon and Urologist,
has conducted over 250 humanitarian missions and visited over 180 countries
I am among those who believe that
another world is possible.
Nevertheless, I am also among those who
believe that misery, and consequently hunger,
are our collective shame, that climate change,
mass migration, religious wars and conflicts
that multiply are the great challenges of
humanity and that only the junction of an
organized, convinced, active and nonconformist
civil society, and ethical and with human
responsibility companies and governments,
will be able to face these obstacles with will,
sensitivity, determination and responsibility.
The Hunger and Food Waste persistent in the
world today form an absurd and intolerable
nonsense.
According to the World Food Programme, there
are currently 842 million people who do not
have enough to eat, that is, 1 in 9 people in the
world is starving.
Soon, 2030 will be here and the world may have
to face a deep global food crisis.
With climate change as a scary background,
whatever we may do today, the effects of
global warming due to massive CO2 emissions
and destruction of the ozone layer are already
inevitable for the next 20 or 30 years.
The essential positive decisions that might be
taken today, such as the significant reduction
of emission of gases with greenhouse effect
(and I fear that the incompetent and weak
global governance still remains a prisoner or
subservient of very powerful interests and
lobbies for oil companies and other polluting
energy sources - coal, shale, bituminous ...),
shall only be effective in 20, 30 or even 40 years!
“There are currently 842
million people who do
not have enough to eat,
that is, 1 in 9 people in
the world is starving.”
It is, therefore of a new civilizational paradigm
that our world urgently needs!
In the new paradigms, that will eventually
impose themselves, one way or another,
Humanism, Sensitivity, Knowledge, Intelligence
and Common Sense must prevail. This is
about assuring Global Survival and preventing
genocide with Dantesque dimensions. One
thing is certain: our planet cannot stand that
all its inhabitants live in the standard of living
and consumption of the West! In short, our
ecological footprint is unsustainable.
Each year that passes without a determined
and, if possible, decisive global action,
decreases the chance of success to reverse
the current and negative trends, continuing
underdevelopment as a huge challenge/threat
to peace, to which also contributes the drama
of illegal migration south/north and east/west
across the Sahara and the Mediterranean that
culminates in real tragedies day after day.
This calamity was not the first and will not,
unfortunately, be the last as long as the
international community does not show a real
will to deal with this problem and there is no
political courage, vision and determination to
stop the conflicts in Africa and in the Middle
East and to conduct a real development plan in
these regions to ensure urgently to
its inhabitants a sustainable future and a
renewed hope.
Migration is a basic human right. People only
emigrate from their country, leaving everything
behind, when they don’t have an alternative,
either for economic, security and, very soon,
climate reasons.
With about 50 million refugees and
displaced persons in the world, and with the
aforementioned climate change, which will
cause many more tens of millions of refugees
and displaced persons, the migration movement
will take a breadth never seen before.