A Call for 'New Agriculture'

No one should go hungry, wherever they live in the world,” said the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in the first of a six-part essay series, a “Catholic call for a new agriculture.” The N.C.R.L.C., based in Des Moines, Iowa, warned, “By the end of this year, weather disruptions and rising food prices may drive” the number of hungry people in the world “back to 1 billion, where it last peaked in 2008 due to a spike in food prices. That’s one in every seven people.” The group said that one linchpin of “a new agricultural ethic” would be the concept of “food sovereignty,” where “stakeholders strive to participate in policy decisions concerning their food,” and food security, “a basic calculation of how much food needs to be produced by farmers in order to meet the caloric needs of a population.”