How to share the world's resources

It is high time that governments considered life-threatening poverty to be a humanitarian emergency and treated this preventable crisis accordingly. If we are serious about putting the principle of sharing at the heart of our response to global crises, the first step in this process of world reconstruction must be an international program of emergency relief to end life-threatening conditions of poverty.

The practice of sharing has a pivotal role to play in a new paradigm for food and agriculture, but it has to be a true form of economic sharing that addresses the power structures and politics underlying an unjust global economy. It is imperative that governments finally accept their responsibility for ensuring adequate diets for all the world's people, and enact policies to democratise and localise food systems.

Guaranteeing everyone access to essential goods and services will not be enough to create a just and sustainable world. Governments also need to rethink the management of an economic system built upon endless consumption and competition over scarce resources, which will be impossible to achieve without new governance regimes for sharing the ‘global commons’.