There is something peculiar about asking a person to plan a better future when getting through the week already requires all their ingenuity. We admire resourcefulness, quite reasonably. But admiration becomes a cheap substitute for help when we expect people to keep finding ways around a shortage of something they cannot live without.
SANA reports that the EU has called at the UN General Assembly for global action on poverty and the right to food. The supplied report gives no basis for judging what commitments might follow. A call is still a call. Yet the subject deserves attention beyond the familiar argument about whether international gatherings achieve enough.
It asks us to consider what we mean when we tell people to take responsibility for their lives.
Food is an awkward test of that idea because it leaves so little room for abstraction. Consider a parent deciding whether to pay a bill or buy enough groceries. There may be choices available, but calling them choices does not make either consequence acceptable. We should be wary of mistaking the existence of a decision for the existence of freedom.
Personal responsibility still matters. So does the question of how help is organised, paid for and sustained. Declaring a right does not fill a cupboard, and good intentions do not remove the need for competent work. Anyone taking food rights seriously should welcome those practical difficulties being examined rather than treating scrutiny as a failure of compassion.
But the difficulties cannot become an endless postponement. If we insist that people should stand on their own feet, we have some responsibility to examine what makes standing possible.
That has consequences closer to home than the UN. At work, it means considering whether the demands made of people leave them able to meet ordinary living costs. In our dealings with someone asking for help, it means resisting the urge to make assistance conditional on a convincing performance of desperation.
There is room to argue about methods. There needs to be. What deserves much less patience is the assumption that hardship must first become visibly unbearable before anyone else has a responsibility to respond. By then, we are asking someone to rebuild a life we might have helped them keep together.