World Hunger and Poverty

…according to the USDA report, more than 35 million people were living in households that are “food insecure.” That means 12 percent of the U.S. population didn’t get enough to eat for at least part of last year.

According to the report, things got even worse for those who are worst off. The number of people in the USDA’s “very low food security” category–households in which “the food intake of some household members was reduced and their normal eating patterns were disrupted”–rose in 2005 to 10.8 million.

Hunger rates were higher for Black households (22.4 percent) and Hispanic households (17.9 percent) than the national average.

IN SPITE of the Bush administration’s claim that the economy is strong, food pantries and soup kitchens report being stretched to the breaking point.

In Battle Creek, Mich., the Food Bank of South Central Michigan is using leftover food from restaurants to fill the gap between the needs of hungry people and what corporate and private donations will buy. “This is what we call ‘deep diving,’” Teresa Osborne, who leads the food bank’s donor and community relations program, told the Chicago Tribune, describing collecting discarded food from local restaurants.

At the same time as the need has increased, federal food assistance to pantries, in the form of commodities like milk products and canned goods, is down about 55 percent since 2001.

Read entire Counter Punch article by Elizabeth Schulte.

This demonstrates the way in which government never solves the hunger & poverty problem. Accordingly, it also demonstrates the futility of our appeals to government. Quite frankly, a government will only give people enough to make them dependent on the government. Similarly, generally the people in power will never empower the impoverished and disenfranchised people. Naturally, the people in power do what helps themselves and what allows themselves to retain or increase their own power. If we want to solve the problems facing our communities and world, such as hunger and poverty, we have to do it ourselves through voluntary cooperation and non-governmental organizations, such as private charities and local trade networks.

I agree with Elizabeth Schulte that we have serious problems facing us and our world, such as hunger and poverty. I agree with Elizabeth Schulte that these problems need immediate attention, and that our society needs change. However, the government will not cause this change, and only makes our society’s problems worse. Thus, I disagree with Schulte when she suggests implementing or increasing government programs and subsidies.

Nonetheless, her well-written article raises many good points and contains many enlightening facts. For example, I agree with her when she says the following:

EVERY DAY, people are forced to make what could be life-and-death decisions, based on poverty.

According to America’s Second Harvest’s Hunger in America Study 2006, 42 percent of the people they serve had to choose between paying for food and paying for utilities or heating fuel. Thirty-five percent had to choose between paying for food and paying their rent or mortgage.

It makes no sense, in a country with so much wealth and resources, that a single person goes hungry.

[...]

No one should ever have to make the decision between food, shelter or other fundamental human needs.

What do you think?

Economist Muhammad Yunus accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Sunday for his breakthrough program to lift the poor through tiny loans, saying he hoped the award would inspire “bold initiatives” to eradicate a problem at the root of terrorism.

Yunus, a 66-year-old Bangladeshi, shared the award with his Grameen Bank, which for more than two decades has helped impoverished people start businesses by providing small, usually unsecured loans known as microcredit.

“We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time,” Yunus told hundreds of guests at City Hall in Oslo, Norway. “I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns.”

Economics winner Edmund S. Phelps was cited for research into the relationship between inflation and unemployment, giving governments better tools to formulate economic policy.

Read entire AP article by Karl Ritter.

We have previously blogged about microfinance loans and the Grameen Bank. (See: Fighting Poverty $1 At A Time.) In addition to the above article, you can check out the Grameen Foundation Website.

I see the greatest aspect of the microcredit philosophy as the fact that it helps people help themselves. With just a small loan, the Grameen Bank enables its clients to permanently escape poverty through their own businesses and labor. This works much more effectively (and cheaply) than other methods which involve just throwing money and food at the problem. In fact, just dumping food into these malnurished communities often hurts them, because it undermines the local markets. In contrast, microloans stimulate the economies of these places by giving these underprivileged people the opportunity to help themselves and develop their businesses.

What do you think?

10 December 2006 marks the 58th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. During the last 60 years many achievements have been made in the name of human rights, but considerable challenges still remains to be fulfilled in making human rights an irreversible reality in the world.

[...]the fact remains that around 3.2 billion people still live on less than $2 a day, which might be the correct estimate of today’s poverty. “Poverty is more than just a lack of income,” the UN has declared (A Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies, UNHCHR, 2002). “It is also the lack of health care, education, access to political participation, decent work and security.”

It is admirable that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has identified poverty as the gravest challenge of human rights today in her 2006 pre-Human Rights Day Statement. It goes as follows: “Today, poverty prevails as the gravest human rights challenge in the world. Combating poverty, deprivation and exclusion is not a matter of charity, and it does not depend on how rich a country is. By tackling poverty as a matter of human rights obligation, the world will have a better chance of abolishing this scourge in our lifetime. Poverty eradication is an achievable goal.”

What might be necessary for poverty eradication is to make sure first that no one dies of hunger. But this is far from the world reality today. Among the poor, overwhelming majority are young and children (both girls and boys), because the poor normally don’t grow old. The second important task is to make sure that children go to school and get education, of course ensuring at least basic health care and housing for them as well as their parents. When they grow up, these children should be trained with the skills needed to acquire jobs or seek self-employment, in addition to facilities for those who are willing and capable of seeking higher education.

Read entire Asian Tribune article by Professor Laksiri Fernando. 

I highly recommend you follow the above link and read the entire article, not just the excerpt that I have included. In it, Professor Laksiri Fernando explores the statements of the UN, and expresses information about social inequality – such as that the world’s largest economies are corporations, not nations – and he explains the steps required to put an end to hunger and poverty.

Unfortunately, in the last 58 years since the declaration of human rights, hunger has continued to plague humanity. Innocent children suffer and often die in the agony of hunger and poverty. In fact, 16,000 children die of hunger every day. Even in the United States, 14 million children live in food insecure households. It seems the UN lacks the capability to solve this problem. The governments of the world have more interest in putting tax-dollars to military spending, going to the moon, enforcing drug laws, etc., rather than feeding and educating innocent children who suffer from preventable poverty and hunger, and preventable diseases.

Thus, if we want to solve these problems, we the people have to do it ourselves. We need to stop appealing to negligent governments, and instead create non-governmental organizations and solve these problems ourselves through voluntary solidarity. Our governments and politicians have no interest in solving our problems, so the only effective solution comes from grassroots activism. To that end, I highly recommend the book Globalize Liberation: How To Uproot The System And Build A Better World by David Solnit.

What do you think?

About 6.3 percent of households in South Carolina – roughly 100,000 families – had “very low food security,” according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study issued last month.

That means normal eating patterns were disrupted and some had less to eat.

The percentage is the highest in the nation and well above the U.S. average of 3.8 percent.

“If you look at transportation and livable wages, South Carolina is really not doing well,” said Susan Berkowitz, director of the S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, another anti-poverty advocacy group.

“We have high levels of uninsured, low levels of education. It just all adds up.”

The USDA and Legal Justice Center reports don’t indicate South Carolina families regularly go without food.

Instead, advocates say the working poor rely more on aid agencies and programs for food as they use more of their modest income on increasingly expensive needs such as transportation and health care.

Read entire Sun News article.

South Carolina needs to unify and fix these problems in their state, which as the article points out extend beyond hunger and poverty. Hunger and poverty are just symptoms. All of us, including South Carolina, cannot solve the problem by attacking the symptoms. We need to take all the factors into consideration, including education, healthcare, and employment opportunity. Even high employment rates mean little when the jobs fail to pay enough for the workers to support themselves, and avoid hunger and poverty.

We all need to heed that advice, because this problem not only exists in South Carolina, but also exists at the national and global level. Let’s continue the war on poverty and hunger long after the holiday season.

What do you think?

The suburban poor outnumbered inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas released today.

“Economies are regional now,” said Alan Berube, who co-wrote the report for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “Where you see increases in city poverty, in almost every metropolitan area, you also see increases in suburban poverty.”

Nationally, the poverty rate leveled off last year at 12.6 percent after increasing every year since the decade began. It was a period during which the country went through a recession and an uneven recovery that is sputtering in parts of the Northeast and Midwest.

The federal government defined the poverty level as $15,577 for a family of three in 2005.

The poverty rate in large cities (18.8 percent) is higher than it is in the suburbs (9.4 percent). But the overall number of people living in poverty is higher in the suburbs, in part because of population growth.

In 1999, the number of poor people living in cities and suburbs was roughly even, at about 10.3 million each, according to the report. Last year, the suburban poor outnumbered their urban counterparts by about 1.2 million.

Cleveland was the city with the highest poverty rate last year, at 32.4 percent. McAllen, Texas, was the suburb with the highest poverty rate, at 43.9 percent.

Read entire AP article.

It’s hard to imagine a family of three of living on a 16 thousand income, but such a family wouldn’t even be considered poor with the low numbers the government uses to determine the poverty rate. With a more appropriate number, I imagine the suburban poor would outnumber the urban poor by even more; especially since the cost of living is higher for the suburban poor.

These new findings demonstrate that the problem of poverty isn’t some tiny foriegn issue affecting strangers. Poverty is a major widespread issue affecting our own communities. In fact, most Americans live in debt. Although, obedient middle-class Americans can put food on their tables with credit-cards, an economic recession or a hike in interest rates could quickly bring back a new American depression and put physical hunger right into the lives of the average working-class American.

Americans could effectively eliminate this threat by making fundamental change to the economic status quo. This change doesn’t need to come from the government, but rather the American people can stop participating in the credit-based economic system and instead utilize habits that retain the wealth in the working-class communities. Currently, the working-class is trapped by a government-backed credit-based economic system in which a lazy unproductive ruling class (namely the bankers and corporate shareholders) weasel the wealth from the productive masses via theft and manipulation. Suburban poverty is a symptom of this non-meritocratic social inequality.

An unprecedented effort to protect the world’s food supplies from the ravages of climate change will be launched today by an international consortium of scientists. The move marks a growing recognition that serious changes in weather patterns are inevitable over the coming decades, and that society must begin to adapt.

Some £200-million a year will be poured into the research by governments across the world to help agricultural experts develop crops that can withstand heat and drought, find more efficient farming techniques and make better use of increasingly fragile soil and scarce water supplies.

The Stern review of the economics of climate change said a 2-3C rise in average global temperatures would put 30-200 million more people at risk of hunger. Once temperatures rise 3C, 250-550 million extra people will be at risk, more than half in Africa and western Asia. At 4C and above, global food production is likely to be hit hard. The British scientist James Lovelock warned last week that such food shortages could trigger a growing number of conflicts this century between nations desperate to find fertile land to feed their people.

Read entire U.K. Guardian article.

Thankfully, these organizations realize this particular effect of global warming, and work to counter it. However, the article says nothing about preventing man-made global warming in the first place. The dangerous gases that certain corporations and people let into our air cause many other problems in addition to global warming.

In fact, the legal immunity with which these polluters destroy our environment shows the governmentally-enforced socioeconomic inequality, which factors into the serious issues of hunger and poverty.

Live and let live. If these corporations and other polluters want to make money, good for them, but they must only do it without offensively harming anyone else. When they pollute our air and kill our environment with poisonous gases and such, they offensively harm us. Let’s defend ourselves, and the hungry and poor.

Sounds peculiar at first.

You attend a charity banquet with a friend. Maybe you paid to get in. Maybe you didn’t. Your friend gets a full meal at a linen-clothed table while you sit on the floor and share a bowl of rice with strangers.

Not fair?

That’s the point.

It’s called a hunger banquet. And this symbolic event has become an increasingly popular way to educate people about world hunger — and often solicit donations.

The concept was originally conceived by aid and development organization Oxfam. Each year, especially during the giving yet gluttonous holiday season, Oxfam says the number of hunger banquets across the U.S. has grown dramatically.

You may not be satisfied.

Unlike wedding receptions, potluck dinners or other communal feasting opportunities, the goal of a hunger banquet is not to provide participants with a free meal. Instead, hunger banquets aim to offer an experiential glimpse at the statistics of world hunger and poverty.

“Let’s say you invite 100 people,” says Delaney. “As the people enter the room, they receive one of three different tickets. Fifteen of those people receive a full-course meal, sit at a table with nice linens, crystal, flowers, the works. Twenty-five of those people typically sit in a chair. They don’t have a table. They receive a simple meal of rice and beans. And 60 of those people will sit on the floor and share a communal bowl of rice.”

Depending on where you sit and what you eat, a speaker will inform you what role you play in world hunger, whether you’re a starving mother from Mozambique or a Guatemalan coffee farmer who’s just getting by. At the end of the meal, participants are often asked to share their personal experiences.

Read entire West Central Tribune.

I think this a great idea, and an effective way to spread information about hunger. Although hunger statistics shock most people, statistics still lack the emotional realism that an experience such as a “hunger banquet” delivers. The blatant unfairness of such an experiment shows participants the blatant unfairness of world hunger and poverty. Often times people born with opportunity and luxury mistake poverty and hunger as a self-induced phenomenon. No offense to such people; how can one imagine the trap of poverty and inopportunity when one has always had food and opportunity. Many children grow up and often die in hunger and poverty. Even in the U.S. 50% of children born into poverty remain in poverty for the rest of their lives. A “hunger banquet” demonstrates such unfairness to participants.

What do you think?

With less than two months before he steps down as secretary-general after a 10-year tenure, Kofi Annan is disappointed that the international community is lagging behind in its much-touted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

At this rate, he warns, many of the goals will not be met, “so we need to re-affirm our commitment to these goals,” which also include achieving universal primary education and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

s part of this process of re-commitment, the United Nations has turned to the world’s younger generation to increase awareness of the MDGs, and to help spread the word at the grassroots level.

“The older generation of leaders from around the world endorsed the Millennium Development Goals for 2015,” said Djibril Diallo, chair of the summit, “but it will take the full commitment and talents of the younger generation to help achieve them.”

According to the United Nations, younger people represent one-fourth of the world’s six billion people, of which 86 percent live in the developing world.

The United Nations estimates that one in five youth live on less than a dollar a day, and about 45 percent live on less than two dollars a day.

Read entire FinalCall.com News article.

I agree with Kofi Annan that positive change in the world depends on the youth. The youth suffer the worst from the terrible effects of social injustice, inequality, hunger, and poverty. Further, the youth possess a stronger sense of justice and idealism, and they lack the cynicism and institutionalization of older people. When the youth inherit the world, they can change the world and finally put an end to the hunger and poverty epidemic.

What do you think?

A recent article on ProgressiveU.org points out a main factor in world hunger, the destruction of food:

If all food produced worldwide every year was counted, there would be enough to feed double the world’s current population. So why is it that 36 million people die of malnutrition every year? World hunger is a vast and complex problem and no single action or practice can be pinpointed as the true cause. Similarly, no single solution exists to solve the issue in its entirety. However, ending the practice of destroying food products with the intent of increasing prices would be a crucial step in ending global malnutrition.

The act of destroying or withholding crops in order to drive up prices has occurred since the Great Depression, during which 257 million bushels of grain were stockpiled in order to raise prices. Today, the United Nations reports that many governments and corporations commonly destroy food to create an artificial scarcity. For example, in the United Kingdom, 17 million tons of food are plowed into landfills every year – more than five times the amount needed to feed the three million starving people in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Laws of Supply and Demand, as the supply decreases and the demand remains stable, prices must increase, thus allowing corporations to amass a significantly higher profit when a portion of crops are destroyed. However, this practice is unacceptable when one in every seven people globally suffers from malnutrion.

The article also explains the cycle of poverty:

A critical issue that must be faced when addressing world hunger is the cycle of poverty in which many become entrapped. Starvation is a trap in and of itself. According to the World Hunger Education Service (9/9/06), malnutrition causes poor health, low levels of energy, and even mental impairment, and thus leads to even greater poverty by reducing a person’s ability to work. Simply, when an individual is starving, he cannot maintain a job and support himself or family. Without a job, he makes no money to buy food, in turn, further deteriorating his health and ability to work.

I agree. And, with so many people getting stuck in this horrible cycle of poverty, I find it disgusting that corporations and governments would destroy food just to increase profits.

What do you think?

The below is a letter written by Nelson Mandela, of whom I am a great admirer.

While poverty persists, there is no freedom
BY NELSON MANDELA
khaleejtimes.com
7 November 2006

[I have posted the poem he mentions, From the Republic of Conscience, below]

IN JOHANNESBURG, this week, in the warm company of friends, like Nadine Gordimer, I became an Amnesty International ambassador of conscience. It was a joy for me to receive this honour from the members of the world’s largest human rights movement. It was heartening too that the award was inspired by the great Irish writer Seamus Heaney’s poem From the Republic of Conscience, which reminds us all of our duty. Their embassies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

Like Amnesty International, I have been struggling for justice and human rights for long years. I have retired from public life now. But as long as injustice and inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest. We must become stronger still.

Through the work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, I am continuing my struggle for human rights. These three charitable institutions operating in my name are tasked with continuing my work in important areas I have been concerned with throughout my life: children and youth, memory and dialogue, and building new generations of ethical leaders.

It is my wish that this award should help all activists around the world to shine their candles of hope for the forgotten prisoners of poverty. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is people who have made poverty and tolerated poverty, and it is people who will overcome it.

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of fundamental human rights. Everyone everywhere has the right to live with dignity, free from fear and oppression, free from hunger and thirst, and free to express themselves and associate at will.

Yet in this new century millions of people remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. Massive poverty and inequality are terrible scourges of our times – times in which the world also boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation.

While poverty persists, there is no true freedom. Amnesty International is right to stand up against the rights violations that drive and deepen poverty. People living in poverty have the least access to power to shape policies – to shape their future. But they have the right to a voice. They must not be made to sit in silence as “development” happens around them, at their expense. True development is impossible without the participation of those concerned.

Take the right to housing. Three million people in Africa have been evicted from informal settlements since the turn of the century.

We have also seen in Africa the scourge of HIV-Aids, decimating the lives of our people, especially those living in poverty. All of us – rich and poor, governments, companies and individuals – share the responsibility of ensuring that everyone has access to information, means of prevention and treatment. And our starting point must be respect for individuals’ rights.

We know that it is the already marginalised who are most affected by HIV-Aids. And we know that, within this group, women are marginalised yet more and bear the most significant burden. As daughters, mothers, sisters and grandmothers, every day they experience and live out the reality of this pandemic.

Women are also being killed by other preventable causes. One woman dies every minute from conditions relating to pregnancy. And where do almost all these women live? In the developing world — in poverty. Amnesty International is working to make rights real for women, through its work on poverty, and through its campaigning against the violence they face.

Women and girls need safe environments to learn and to work. At the moment, discrimination and violence exacerbate their lack of access to the very tools they need to make their own rights a reality. If girls do not have a safe and non-discriminatory environment to pursue education or gain employment, the consequences reverberate throughout their lives, denying them the choice and freedom we take for granted.

Women and girls living in abusive relationships, for example, are unable to flee the violence because they are financially dependent on their abusers. This balance of power, and the broader one it represents, must be shifted.

I have spoken before about the need for a turning point. I see this ambassador of conscience award as one more step towards that turning point. Nadine Gordimer has recalled a conversation she and I had in 1998, when I said: “What I want to see is an environment where the young people of our country have a real chance to develop the inherent possibilities they have to create a better life for themselves… That is what development is about.”

If all human rights activists around the world believe this, and act on this, and get others to believe, we will have our turning point.

From the Republic of Conscience
by Seamus Heaney

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs
woman having insisted my allowance was myself.
The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.
He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.