Podium: Our Obligation to Care and Share Hilde Johnson; Norwegian Minister of International Development to the Oslo Meeting on Ethical Values in International Relations

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GRUB FIRST, then ethics", is a much quoted aphorism of Bertolt Brecht. Ethics may be felt to be a luxury when a man is starving, when the only thing on his mind is the struggle to survive, to feed his family, to keep alive. But this division is artificial, for the provision of food is a core issue in social ethics, since all other functions of human life depend on the ability to find enough to eat.

The freedom to lead a decent life, including freedom from hunger, from avoidable illness, from premature mortality, is dependent on having enough to eat. Hunger is caused by poverty, and poverty is one of the most urgent global ethical challenges facing the …