Mr. Speaker, yesterday the countries participating in the World Food Summit adopted a final declaration reiterating their commitment to a 50% reduction in the number of starving people in the world by the year 2015, that is from 800 million to 400 million.
It is imperative for the wealthy countries to comply with their commitment to allocate 0.7% of their GDP to development aid. At the rate things are going at present, this objective will be attained only 62 years from now.
Canada is well down in the ranking of wealthy countries, as far as international aid is concerned, and must waste no time adopting an action plan in order to attain the objective the UN has set. This objective was set by Lester Pearson in a 1969 report “The State of Food and Agriculture”.
Thirty-three years later, Canada's aid has been cut in half. The Liberal government must stop all this talk about its generosity. Action must be taken and taken quickly, because millions of women and children are dying.