Rome (AFP) – Pope Leo XIV on Thursday condemned the world's failure to stop millions of people from going hungry, blaming a "soulless economy" and calling on others to rethink their lifestyles and priorities.
"Allowing millions of human beings to live -- and die -- victims of hunger is a collective failure, an ethical aberration, a historical sin," Leo said in a speech at the Rome-based UN agricultural agency.
"The scourge of hunger... continues to atrociously plague a significant portion of humanity," he said, a day after the United Nations warned global hunger "is at record levels".
The crisis was "a clear sign of a prevailing insensitivity, a soulless economy", Leo told the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) at a World Food Day ceremony that falls on the agency's 80th anniversary.
Swingeing cuts to aid led by the United States and other wealthy nations, including Britain, France and Germany, are threatening to undermine the fight against poverty and hunger.
Experts warned earlier this year the cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030.
Leo highlighted the "outrageous paradoxes" by which enormous amounts of food go wasted in the world "while multitudes of people scramble to find something in the garbage to put in their mouths".
"How can we explain the inequalities that allow a few to have everything and many to have nothing?" he asked.
Around 319 million people are facing acute food insecurity, including 44 million in emergency levels of hunger, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
"Staggering" cuts to its funding mean it has had to drastically cut aid packages to millions in need, it said this week.
Leo cited in particular "Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Yemen and South Sudan", among other countries "where poverty has become the daily bread".
The Catholic leader also lambasted that people seem "to have forgotten" that using starvation as a weapon is a war crime.
The US pontiff urged the world to rouse itself from "the fatal lethargy in which we are immersed".
"The hungry faces of so many people who still suffer challenge us and invite us to reexamine our lifestyles, our priorities and our way of living in today's world in general," he said.
FAO director-general Qu Dongyu said more must be done to support the more than one billion people who work in the food systems that feed the planet.
He insisted the key was "to empower" those who produce food -- particularly women, who he said must have land rights and access to credit and technology.
Leo said the role of women in the fight against hunger, often overlooked, was in fact "indispensable", dubbing them "the silent architects of survival".