2024-08-16 21:25:55
Hunger is served raw on the world’s great table. By the time you finish reading these lines, at least 10 people will have died from food shortages. Every 4.25 seconds, according to estimates from 238 humanitarian organisations compiled by FAO, someone dies because they have nothing to eat. Some 839 million people around the world were unable to eat adequately last year, 10.7 million more than in 2022, according to findings from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
They are the great hungry for globalization, internationalization, globalisation and all the other elusive and noble designations of this overwhelming process of liberation that entails, among other practices, the suppression of all types of control by the States. Which inevitably produces a radical financing of food economic activity, which transforms a capitalist market system that, according to its doctrine, aims to increase wealth and generate profits through the production of goods, services, food and jobs.in a new capitalism in a regime of speculation and financial accumulation.
The sweet smell of death continues to plague the intemperate beaches of Lampedusa. Too much pain for such a small island, with just 6,000 inhabitants. The 360 coffins lined up in a row left the town raw in the tragedy of 2013. As time has passed, the wound has not stopped hurting and has reopened. These days, there are hundreds of missing people. From there we are reminded of the corpse of the mother who covered her daughter’s mouth to prevent her from drowning, of the young Sudanese woman who gave birth to a son during the crossing and then died, of the Syrian grandfather who lost seven members of his family, and of the ten-year-old Eritrean boy who died wearing an Argentine shirt.
There is an urgent need to broaden the concept of poverty. Specifically, to understand poverty as the pain that is generated by an emotional and material situation of instability. Poverty is the explicit denial of freedom, and pulling this thread, intellectual poverty would be the explicit denial of reason as a tool to free oneself from forms of exploitation.
Sport is a good way to challenge forms of exploitation and poverty associated with hunger. However, the entry of private capital into Argentine football “to improve the quality and life of the member” as Daniel Scioli expressed, is nothing more than another model of exploitation in a private and exclusive system, far removed from the collective concept of protection and shelter.
The growing and persistent inequality in sport must give way to redistributive policies that try to alleviate these inequalities. The privatization of Argentine football is yet another maneuver by these clever ultra-liberals who insist on policies in which what is only good for them is good for everyone.
Journalist, former player for Vélez, Spanish clubs and 1979 World Cup champion.