How Can You Watch These People Die

“Throughout the world there are men, women and little children who have not even the essentials to stay alive; they crowd the cities of many of the poorest countries in the world. This crime fills Me with shame. My brothers, how can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men?” (Maitreya, Message No. 11, 5 January 1978)

According to the latest comprehensive United Nations estimates, approximately 645 million people experienced hunger in 2025, representing 7.8 per cent of the world’s population. Although this was a slight improvement on the previous two years, hunger continued to increase in much of Africa and western Asia.

An even broader measure reveals the true scale of the problem. Approximately 2.1 billion people, or 25.8 per cent of the global population, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2025. This means that they did not have regular access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. (FAO)

These figures are all the more difficult to comprehend because the world already produces enough food to feed everyone. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has stated that sufficient food is produced to feed the global population, while emphasising that the central problems are access to and the availability of nutritious food.

An often-cited article published in the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture estimated that global agriculture was already producing enough food to feed approximately ten billion people. Yet hunger persists because access to food is profoundly unequal, large quantities are lost or wasted, and millions of people lack sufficient income or other means to obtain adequate and nutritious food. This contradiction is especially striking when we remember that the world’s population stood at approximately 8.3 billion people as of July 2026.

The figures for drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene are similarly alarming. According to the latest joint report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, published in August 2025 and based on data for 2024:

• 2.1 billion people, or approximately one person in four, lacked access to safely managed drinking water;
• 3.4 billion people lacked safely managed sanitation services;
• 1.7 billion people lacked basic hygiene services at home.

Among those without access to safely managed drinking water were 106 million people who still obtained their drinking water directly from untreated surface sources.

In a world where sufficient basic goods exist to meet everyone’s needs, the fact that billions of people lack reliable access to food, clean water, and sanitation represents a profound social, political, and moral failure. In this sense, we can understand why Maitreya calls it a crime.

The deliberate denial of food or water can, under certain circumstances, constitute a violation of national or international law. More broadly, when people are systematically deprived of the basic conditions required for life and dignity, their fundamental human rights are being violated.


The Right to Food and Water

The right to food is recognised in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The article recognises everyone’s right to a standard of living adequate for their health and well-being, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services.

The Declaration itself is not a treaty and is therefore not legally binding in the same manner as an international convention. Nevertheless, it has become the foundation of modern international human rights law, and many of its principles have been incorporated into legally binding agreements and national constitutions.

One of the most important of these agreements is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 16 December 1966 and entered into force on 3 January 1976.

Article 11 of the Covenant recognises:

• the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing, and housing;
• the right to the continuous improvement of living conditions;
• the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger;
• and the need “to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need”.

This final provision is particularly significant for the idea of the sharing economy. It recognises that freedom from hunger cannot be guaranteed solely through action within individual states. It also requires international cooperation and a fairer distribution of available food supplies according to human need. In this sense, Article 11 provides an important legal foundation for a global system of sharing essential goods, beginning with food.

The meaning of the right to adequate food was further clarified by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in General Comment No. 12, adopted on 12 May 1999. It is also summarised and explained in the United Nations publication The Right to Adequate Food, Fact Sheet No. 34.

States that are parties to the Covenant are legally obliged to respect, protect, and fulfil the right to adequate food. They must not interfere with existing access to food, must protect people against actions by companies or other third parties that threaten such access, and must take concrete steps towards ensuring that everyone can obtain adequate food. Although the full realisation of this right may be achieved progressively, states have immediate obligations to take action, guarantee its exercise without discrimination, and adopt the measures necessary to prevent and alleviate hunger. 

As of August 2026, 173 states were parties to the Covenant and were therefore legally bound by its provisions.

The right to water was further explained by the Committee in General Comment No. 15, adopted in 2002. It defines the right to water as the right of everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water for personal and domestic use.

On 28 July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognised the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right essential for the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights.


A Question of Our Humanity

Access to food and clean water is therefore not an act of charity. It is a fundamental human right and an essential condition of human dignity. Yet laws and international agreements express only one aspect of the issue. There is also an ethical and moral dimension: the question of our humanity.

How can we accept a world in which hundreds of millions of people are hungry, more than two billion lack safely managed drinking water, and billions lack adequate sanitation, even though humanity possesses sufficient knowledge, productive capacity, resources, and technology to meet these needs?

The persistence of hunger is not simply the result of an absolute global shortage of food. It is closely connected with poverty, inequality, armed conflict, climate disruption, economic instability, inadequate public services, and the failure to share available resources more equitably.

We should therefore remember Maitreya’s words:

“My brothers, how can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men?”

These words are not merely an accusation. They are also a call to awaken our compassion, recognise our shared responsibility, and organise the world’s resources so that every human being may live in dignity.

Source: THE SHARING ECONOMY: Implementing Article 25 in the Twenty-First Century