G20 Foundation Publications Turkey 2015 | Page 62

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.