By Joshua McElwee

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Leo made an urgent plea on Thursday for global leaders to end world hunger, saying in a speech to a United Nations agency that allowing millions to go without food each day represented “an ethical derailment”.

In a visit to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome, the Catholic pontiff also condemned the use of hunger as a weapon of war, without naming any specific conflicts or nations.

Leo cited U.N. figures that around 673 million people do not eat enough each day, calling that number “the clear sign of a prevailing insensitivity, of a soulless economy… and of an unjust and unsustainable system of resource distribution”.

“In a time when science has lengthened life expectancy … allowing millions of human beings to

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