Hypocrisy abounds in our society, especially where the gap between rich and poor is at it's widest. That gap is most apparent in the world when the G8 meets to do good around the world (or so it says) and shape world policy amongst similarly powerful world leaders. This year's topic is the growing food crisis around the planet and what to about it. Since it was so important the G8 decided to have a working lunch to discuss it, and lunch, they most certainly did.
From The Daily Mail:
Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions.
But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis.
The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S.
Now that sounds like a lunch that I want to be at, but there are billions of people around the world that would settle for just one course. Needless to say, representatives of organizations that work on the ground in famished areas were not impressed.
But Dominic Nutt, of the charity Save the Children, did not approve.
'It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal,' he said.
'If the G8 wants to betray the hopes of a generation of children, it is going the right way about it. The food crisis is an emergency and the G8 must treat it as that.'
The only emergency I can see them worrying about is where the vomitorium is. As for helping the world's hungry, the policies of the richest nations has always been to the detriment of developing countries.
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