UN food agency calls for renewed effort to fight hunger:
If the world hopes to achieve a set of internationally agreed development targets by 2015, it must begin by tackling hunger and extreme poverty, especially in sub-Saharan Africa the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today.
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf told the committee, “We stand very little chance of achieving the rest of the goals – environment, education, child mortality, maternal health, gender equality, HIV/AIDS – unless the first MDG is achieved.”
The goal of halving the number of people suffering from poverty and hunger by 2015 appears to be within reach at the global level, said Prabhu Pingali, Director of FAO’s Agricultural and Development Economics Division.
He noted, however, that sub-Saharan Africa lags so far behind the rest of the world that close to half the world’s poor could be living there by 2015.
Safe drinking water, sanitation and good hygiene are fundamental to health, survival, growth and development. However, these basic necessities are still a luxury for many of the world’s poor people.
Over 1.1 billion of our fellow citizens do not use drinking water from improved sources, while 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
Safe drinking water and basic sanitation are so obviously essential to health that they risk being taken for granted.
Every year, unsafe water, coupled with a lack of basic sanitation, kills at least 1.6 million children under the age of five years — more than eight times the number of people who died in the Asian tsunami of 2004.
2.6 billion people, more than 40% of the world population, do not use a toilet, but defecate in the open or in unsanitary places.
Microfinance loans demonstrate a great way to fight poverty and hunger without government interference or state socialist ideas.
The limited amounts of these effective loans proves that the problem lay in the lack of opportunity available to the poor and hungry. Additionally, the fact that these are loans and not monetary gifts, but rather loans that must be repaid, shows that fighting poverty and hunger doesn’t involve impossible costs.
It all started with $50. In 1988, that’s what it took Noni Bala Ghosh to revive her family’s business of making sweets to sell in Kholshi, her tiny village in Bangladesh.
Family members had given up the business because they could no longer afford to buy milk to churn into rich, thick chhana, a milk-derivative that is used in making candy and many sweets.
Driven to despair, Noni heeded the advice of several women in her village who had taken loans from Grameen Bank, a non-profit lending organization that developed the poverty-busting lending program known as “micro-credit,” in the 1970s.
Through a series of small loans from the bank, she soon bought a cow and began to supply her own milk, and eventually engaged her two sons and husband, Gopal, to help support the family business she led. After 3 1/2 years, Noni had become the key supplier to a prominent sweets shop in Dhaka. Once again, she could afford to feed and clothe her family.
Though $50 seems like a relatively small amount to most, it can be the key to breaking out of poverty once and for all for the more than 1 billion people in the world who are living on less than a dollar a day.
Since its beginning, the micro-finance model of providing small loans to help expand or start a self-sustaining enterprise has helped more than 8.2 million of the world’s poorest people — in at least 115 countries — to stand on their feet. (Watch women in Mexico fight poverty — 2:49)
“I never thought it would reach so far,” said Dr. Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the micro-finance system. He first learned of its ability to change a poor person’s outlook on life when in 1976 he decided to lend a total of $27 to pay off the loan-shark debts of 42 villagers in rural Chittagong, Bangladesh.
This short video quickly displays facts about hunger and poverty. At only one minute and fifteen seconds long, this enlightening video is a must-watch:
Charlotte, North Carolina has been home to the nation’s largest Crop Walk for more than 20 years. This year’s walk will be Oct. 15.
The Charlotte Crop Walk raises money to help Loaves & Fishes, Crisis Assistance Ministry and the Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina fight hunger in our area while supporting Church World Services in the global war against poverty. The 2005 Charlotte Crop Walk raised more than $261,000.
New this year is an interactive Web site. Sign up to walk, sponsor a walker or make a donation by visiting www.cropwalk.com or calling 704-333-2955.
Registration the day of the walk begins at 1 p.m. The walk starts at 2:30 p.m. This event begins and ends at Memorial Stadium at Kings Drive and Seventh Street.
Grameen Foundation recently announced it has received a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support its work worldwide. The three-year grant will support Grameen Foundation’s strategic plan to use microfinance loans to ensure that at least 2.5 million poor families permanently escape poverty within five years
Grameen Foundation is a global non-profit organization that combines microfinance, technology and innovation to empower the world’s poorest people to escape poverty.
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world.
These microfinance loans demonstrate the inexpensive way to allow poor and hungry people to help themselves. Poor and hungry families can use loans to fund paths out of poverty, such as education, job-hunts, start-up businesses.
2,819 people died in the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers [1].
16,000 children die every day from hunger [2]. That’s about one child every 5 seconds.
No doubt we have to end hunger, especially childhood hunger. This terrible horror plagues the whole world, not just isolated places. For example, 14 million children in the United States are food insecure [3]. There is no question about the horrible nature of hunger, nor about the need to reduce and eliminate this problem, ASAP. The only question is: “how?”
I think the biggest threat to successfully reducing and eliminating hunger isn’t from the lack of answers to that question. The biggest threat to eliminating hunger isn’t from the apparent apathy of certain people. I think the biggest threat to successfully reducing and eliminating hunger is the false methods, the fools gold that hunger and poverty activists chase after.
Welfare will never end hunger nor poverty. While these activists dream up some amazing deux ex machina, involving some fictionally philanthropic government swooping in and saving everyone, in the real world children are starving to death. We have to end hunger and poverty, but welfare and government spending will never solve those problems.
Taxation
First of all, social spending such as welfare is funded through taxation. I don’t know what these hunger activists are thinking when they come up with the idea of stealing from the rich to end hunger. It’s unfeasible for so many reasons, namely because the rich have too much power. If you try to steal $100,000 from the rich, the rich will just buy politicians for $10,000. The rich never end up paying the taxes, the working-class ends up footing the bill.
Taking from the working-class only hurts the hungry and poor more. Unlike the rich, working-class people live with the poor and hungry, and work with the poor and hungry. In fact, many times the hard-working working-class people are poor. Depending on the criteria of “working poor“, there are between 6.4 and 28 million working poor people in the United States [4].
When the working-class have money, they invest it in their communities by opening businesses, schools, and local stores that increase communal wealth and alleviate hunger, poverty and unemployment. But, these foolish hunger activists ask the government to rob the working class, and thus indirectly rob the hungry.
When a parent finally finds a job that may at least feed half, clothe, and house half of her children, are we actually going to pilfer her earnings though taxation?
By robbing the middle-classes in the name of the poor, these hunger activists increase class war and hinder the lower and working classes. Theft can’t end hunger, but why would we want it to?
Debt
The United States government is in debt trillions of dollars. There’s no money to give the hungry and poor, anyway. Again, the rich aren’t going to foot the bill on this. They’ll push it down to the lower and working classes. In turn, that will just perpetuate the artificial rat race that oppresses the poor, hungry, and working classes.
Dependency
Even if there was a magical money tree to fund these gifts, welfare will never work because of dependency. By just giving away what little wealth they can muster, these activists won’t fight hunger. The way to fight hunger is to stop the cause of hunger. Just giving food to these people will make them dependent on the gifts rather than on actually solving hunger.
As Lau Tzu said, “Give a man a fish; you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; you feed him for a lifetime.”
What even Lao Tzu didn’t mention was that when you give a man a fish, that man also becomes lazy and dependent on that gift. The man won’t have any reason to learn to fish if you give him one for free. The efforts to end hunger must involve employing the poor and reconnecting labor with wealth. Unfortunately, the working-class don’t get the full fruits of their labor, because a non-working upper-class gets it. To fix this, we can’t just try to give away stolen money. We must find a solution that will give the money back to the working. We must find a solution based on production.
To do that we must utilize education. Education and loans are the key to solving hunger.
There’s no way an under-educated populace will change the non-meritocratic system. So, the first step is education, which can easily be funded with loans. What’s a more secure thing to invest in than education? Additionally, food, clothing, and housing can be included in tuition costs. Best of all, student loans don’t need to be taken from government. Private investment can fund student loans, and even turn a profit via interest.
Welfare won’t work because it requires large amounts of non-existent funds, breeds dependence, and increases class war. Instead of helping solve the problem, welfare and the promotion thereof increases the problem. The solution isn’t welfare, it’s education. Although I believe private education is more effective, government sponsored student loans still don’t have the drawbacks of government-sponsored welfare, namely because loans have no net cost. Essentially, we can fight hunger for free.
[2] State of Food Insecurity in the World 2005. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
[3] Nord, M., Andrews, M., Carlson, S. (October 2005) Household Food Security in the United States, 2004. Washington, D.C.: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
