THINKING PRESBYTERIAN

Development and relief agency CWS welcomes the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO )announcement June 12 that 38 countries, including several where CWS supports local hunger and malnutrition programs, have met the internationally established Millennium Development goals to cut hunger in half by 2015.

The FAO also congratulated 18 of those countries for reaching both the Millennium Development Goal on hunger and a more stringent World Food Summit goal to have reduced by half the absolute number of undernourished people. 

The progress of countries in meeting the hunger goals were measured by both the FAO and the World Food Summit between 1990-1992 and 2010-2012, against MDG benchmarks established by the U.N. General Assembly in 2000 and against benchmarks set in 1996 by 180 nations who met at the World Food Summit to deliberate ways to end global hunger.

The Jewish Federations of North America announced June 3 that its trustees had passed a resolution in favor of a nonsegregated place where men and women can pray and read from the Torah at the Western Wall, the Jewish holy site.

 

Worshipers at the Western Wall now have two options: separate men’s and women’s sections, both under the auspices of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, an Orthodox institution.

 

The egalitarian plan will allow the Western Wall to “become a spiritual center for all Jews and a symbol of unity for the entire Jewish community world-wide,” the federation statement said.

Presbyterian Mission Agency’s For Such a Time as This, which pairs small, underserved congregations with recent seminary graduates in a two-year pastoral program, has received the program’s largest single gift—$25,000 from Presbytery of Tampa Bay.

 

Pope Francis on June 5 denounced consumerism and what he called the “culture of waste” of modern economies, especially when it comes to food.

“Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry,” he said during his weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square. 

His words came on the day the United Nations launched an anti-food waste campaign to mark World Environment Day. 

According to data provided by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, approximately 1.3 billion tons of food ― one third of the world’s total food production ― are lost or wasted every year. In the United States, 30 percent of all food is thrown away each year.