Weapons get through lines but not food, says Pope

Pope Francis has told thousands of workers and diplomats at the UN agency which delivers food to crisis areas it is “a strange paradox” that food often cannot get through to those suffering due to war but weapons can.

Francis’s visit to the World Food Program was his first to the UN agency that provides emergency food aid for 80m people in some 80 countries in the world.

The Pope has repeatedly drawn attention to global indifference towards refugees, the poor, and the hungry, and has made food security one of the cornerstones of his papacy, previously visiting the World Food Program’s sister organisation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Francis said that while aid is often obstructed, weapons are trafficked freely.

“As a result, wars are fed, not persons,” he said. “In some cases hunger itself is used as a weapon of war. The death count multiplies because the number of people dying of hunger and thirst is added to that of battlefield casualties and the civilian victims of conflicts and attacks. We are fully aware of this, yet we allow our conscience to be anaesthetised. We become desensitised.”

The message comes just days after the World Food Program announced that it had delivered food for the first time since 2012 to the besieged Syrian town of Darayya, a suburb of Damascus, after receiving the Syrian government’s approval.

The nine-truck convoy last week included rice, lentils, chickpeas, beans, bulgur wheat, oil, salt, and sugar, with enough wheat flour to feed the population of 4,000 for a month.

The programme said that the government’s approval has permitted it to plan more convoys to the 19 besieged locations in Syria this month.