Global Rights Compliance is proud to highlight the work of Concern Worldwide (Concern), an international humanitarian organisation based in Ireland that strives for a world free from poverty and hunger.
For over 50 years, Concern has been delivering life-saving and life-changing interventions to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. From rapid emergency response to innovative development programming, Concern has provided these services in the hardest to reach places to make sure that no-one is left behind.
Nothing Kills Like Hunger
In their newest campaign, Nothing Kills Like Hunger, Concern Worldwide aims to bring people together across every generation to raise awareness of conflict as the single greatest driver of hunger worldwide and ensure it is never used as a weapon of war. In Concern’s words:
“[I]t is unacceptable that people across the world are dying from hunger today, at times due to the deliberate use of hunger as a weapon of war … We all have a responsibility to act now to end the suffering caused by hunger so get involved with the Nothing Kills Like Hunger movement to play your part.”
Sign Concern’s open letter here, joining more than 9,000 people who are calling for political action to end conflict-driven hunger. The letter will be presented to Ireland’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York at a special event in October.
Watch the video below to learn more about the campaign:
Linking Experiences of Famine, Past and Present
Earlier this year, to mark 175 years since Black ’47, the darkest year of the Irish Famine, Concern unveiled a mural in Dublin that resulted from a collaboration between Irish mural artist Emmalene Blake and South Sudanese artist Abul Oyay.
The mural depicted Abul as a young girl in South Sudan gathering water lilies with her grandmother for the family to eat when no other food was available. By drawing the link with Ireland’s historic experience, the mural aimed to spark public awareness of how people continue to endure hunger today.
In an accompanying blogpost, Abul explains:
When we ran away from Ethiopia to Malakal in 1991, there was a time where a lot of us depended on food aid, and then there was a time there was no food coming in, so we had to look for other ways to survive. Grandma used to get the water lilies, and we would get the seeds and dry them and pound them into a powder. We would make asida (a kind of cooked dough) with it and eat it with a sauce. Of course, when you’re young, you’re not told about famine, so for me, it was just any other food. But later on, when I was grown, Grandma would explain what happened at the time and how she had to look for ways for us to survive.
Ireland’s Role on the World Stage
In their advocacy, Concern has encouraged here the government of Ireland to continuously raise the issue of conflict-driven hunger during their membership of the UN Security Council. Since joining Council in January 2021, Ireland has championed the issue of conflict-driven hunger, working to strengthen the UN’s conflict prevention activities and address the underlying drivers of conflict, such as food insecurity and violations of human rights.
In a press conference ahead of an Arria formula meeting of the Security Councill, Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason, who recently moved from New York to Washington DC, said earlier this year:
For Ireland, the issue of hunger is personal. Our own cataclysmic famine 175 years ago still, to the day, has remarkable echoes on the island. It profoundly shapes outlook and demographics in Ireland. It’s what President Michael D. Higgins has called “the burden of an unaddressed tragedy”. As a nation, we are repulsed at the notion of death through starvation.
We are resolute that, in a world of plenty, there can be absolutely no excuse for famine. Increasingly, conflict is a major cause of rising hunger levels […] Ireland calls on all of us here at the UN to do our job, to prevent conflict before it begins, to end conflict before it results in hunger, and to hold to account those who unacceptably use hunger as a weapon of war.
A Growing Global Food Crisis
Nothing is more powerful than conflict when it comes to driving hunger, and this has never been as clear as in recent months. Already in early March, Dominic MacSorley, Concern CEO, sounded the alarm on the threat to global food security arising from the conflict in Ukraine, which is having knock-on effects on people living in poverty worldwide.
GRC and Concern are both committed to ensuring that Ireland and other key states take concrete actions to break the link between conflict and hunger. Watch out for GRC’s upcoming interview with Gisela Schmidt-Martin, Advocacy Adviser with Concern, where she discusses the mission of Concern, trends and challenges being witnessed in relation to conflict and hunger at the national and international level, and what Ireland can do to build on its work to further the conflict and hunger agenda beyond their time on the UN Security Council.
