Food & Climate
Pope Francis has been one of the most concerned clergymen with food and climate issues, repeatedly calling for the world to eradicate hunger, describing its spread as a crime once and a scandal another time.
Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 at his residence in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.
Pope Francis buried today, after funeral attended by world leaders, royals and 400,000 mourners. Pope Francis has been eulogised as “a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone” during a funeral mass.
“Food & Climate” platform reviews some of Pope Francis’ situations on food and climate issues, revealing the late Pope’s deep concern for these two issues.
Hunger as a scandal
On November 10, 2021, Pope Francis described hunger as a scandal. He said: “Hunger is a “scandal” whose crime “violates basic human rights”.
In a United Nations (U.N.) meeting in Rome, the Pope argued that the world holds enough food for all yet sees prevalent hunger. The Pope’s message aligned with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s assertion that a third of greenhouse gas emissions is due to global food systems.
The Pope spoke during the July 2021, Pre-Summit of the U.N. Food Systems Summit that focused on scientific, evidence-based solutions to food systems transformation. Pope Francis noted that COVID-19 has underlined the “systemic injustices that undermine our unity as a human family.” Further, he pointed out the paradoxical nature of the technologies designed to increase food capacity as it “exploits nature to the point of sterilization”.
He said that the poorest people suffer the most because we inflict damage “…through irresponsible use and abuse of the goods God has placed in it.”
In a similar July message that the Vatican published, the Pope spoke of the preventable nature of forced displacements, terrorism and wars. He contended that these are all precursors to hunger. In the message, Pope Francis also elaborated on the lack of solidarity plaguing humans that stunts resolutions to end malnutrition. He spoke of a desire not to promote “mere progress” or “development goals in theory.” He wrote, “All of us realize that the intention to provide everyone with his or her daily bread is not enough”, according to “borgen project org”.
And on July 3, 2023, Pope Francis appeals for “joint, multilateral action” on the part of all nations and organizations “to eradicate the scourge of hunger” starving millions worldwide. His message is addressed to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization’s 43rd Session.
In the Pope’s message, he cordially greeted all the conference’s participants, and encouraged the FAO’s Director-General to continue his commitment, “at a time when decisive and competent action to eradicate the scourge of hunger in the world is inescapable.”
“The challenge we face,” the Pope observed, “is joint and collaborative action by the entire family of nations”, according “Vatican News”.
Climate change: It was a profound failure of human morality
In the weeks before his death, Francis repeated a decade-old plea for a break from both Trumpian greed and the left’s economic rationalism.
Nearly 10 years ago, Pope Francis released a brutal diagnosis of climate change: It was a profound failure of human morality.
Read today, in the week of his death, the pamphlet feels both more distant and more urgent than ever. Its message of unity and healing with nature is worlds away from today’s discourse of clashing greed, national competition and climate-trashing populism in places like the U.S. and his homeland of Argentina.
Francis’ intent was revolutionary. “There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself,” he wrote in Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You).
But such a clear moral position is rarely heard today from climate leaders and champions — many of whom praised Francis this week as a patron saint of their cause.
The pope’s words arrived at a high point for climate morality. The Paris Agreement, which came six months after the encyclical, emerged from countries partially setting aside national interests in deference to a common good. Several years later, Greta Thunberg’s outrage that future generations would pay for the costs of fossil fuels cut through — for a while.
Now, Donald Trump’s administration is waging an all-out assault on climate work and a more Hobbesian, everyone-for-themselves mentality is taking hold worldwide. Those still waving the climate flag have largely restricted themselves to a rational, self-interested argument: Fighting climate change means economic growth.
Francis, who took his pope name from the nature-loving Saint Francis of Assisi, could barely contain his scorn for what he saw as the smallness of this approach.
He said that a narrow cult of technocracy and progress had come to dominate the landscape of human thought. The negative side effects — including the breakdown of the natural systems that sustain human society — were ignored because people had become blind to their links to the planet and its other lifeforms.
Climate change is an “ethical and spiritual” crisis, he said, requiring all people to “look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms”, according to “Politico“.