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Good morning. The report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warns that the impacts of global warming are likely to be ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’. Amongst those impacts will be reductions by as much as 25% in yields from vital crops such as maize, rice and wheat, and a decline of 50% in catches of fish in the tropics and in Antarctica – all against the backdrop of a rising population placing ever greater demands on food supplies as well as on the very land on which our food is grown. For some of us, in some favoured countries in the West, food security is something we have, at least in recent years, mostly taken for granted . Hunger, so we may have thought, was something which happened somewhere else, but not here. But it may turn out that the period between the end of wartime rationing and a future in which the impacts of global warming begin to bite, when a few of us enjoyed such security, will come to be seen as a brief exception to the norm – for most people, in most of the world, for most of the time, the food supply has been anything but secure. One of Christ’s most striking miracles is, of course, the feeding of a hungry crowd of five thousand in the wilderness, when he took five loaves and two fishes and fed them all – with the left overs exceeding the amount of food with which he had started. Nineteenth century German scholars liked to look for ways of rationalizing the miracles and explained this one by saying that when the disciples started to share out their own meagre rations, everyone else was shamed into doing the same – and lo and behold there was more than enough to go round. Well, it’s not a terribly promising way of approaching Christ’s miracles in general - think of the miracle of water into wine at Cana, which would require everyone to be carrying a hip flask, I suppose - but the rationalization of this miracle does make an important point made in a different way by Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize winning economist. Sen has argued that famine and starvation occur not only because of shortages of food, but because of failures in systems of distribution – indeed in some years of the notorious Bengal famine, food production was actually higher than in non-famine years. Hunger results not from lack of food, but from lack of an effective social will to distribute what there is. I think that some people still hope that we can deal with the effects of climate change with some whizz-bang technological miracles – of which new improved GM crops would be one example. And maybe such technologies do indeed have a contribution to make. But it is hard to get away from the thought no technical fix would ever work without an essential social one – as simple, or perhaps as hard, as our getting better at sharing.