World Hunger and Poverty

Canada came up with a great way to help fight world hunger this Halloween. Read the press release published on newswire.ca:

From coast to coast, youth will be trick-or-treating for non-perishable foods instead of candy through Free The Children’s Halloween for Hunger campaign. This annual campaign challenges young people to think locally and act globally in the fight against poverty. Food collected by all the ghouls, ghosts and goblins will be generously donated to local food banks.

This evening youth will be haunting the streets to help those living in need. In the first year of Halloween for Hunger, Free The Children Youth in Action groups went door-to-door and collected 10,500 lbs of food. Now in its sixth consecutive year, participants from all over North America are preparing to help others in the collection of non-perishable foods.

Sandra DaSilva, a teacher from Cariboo Hill Secondary School, British Columbia, has supported her students to participate in the campaign for the past two years and will be doing so again this year. “I believe it’s important to support our communities – both locally and globally. Halloween for Hunger allows youth to reach out and affect the lives of others” says DaSilva.

Halloween for Hunger also brings friends together. Jordana Weiss, 17, Toronto, enjoys spending her Halloween a little differently than some of her peers, but feels that it is more satisfying to help others. “Halloween for Hunger allows me to have a good time with my friends while gathering food for the people in our community. This is a great example of how we can make a difference and have fun at the same time!”

Groups and individuals get involved with Halloween for Hunger to help alleviate hunger and raise awareness of global poverty. Nearly 38 per cent of Canadians who use food banks every month are children. To make a difference this Halloween and to learn more, visit www.freethechildren.com.

Free The Children is the world’s largest network of children helping children through education, with more than one million young people involved in its innovative programs in 45 countries. Founded in 1995 by international child rights activist Craig Kielburger, the organization has an established track record of success with three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize and partnerships with the United Nations and Oprah’s Angel Network. With the energy and passion of young people and the help of adult supporters, Free The Children has, to date, built 450 schools that provide a daily education to 40,000 children.

For further information: or to schedule a conversation with a group participating in Halloween for Hunger, please contact Amy Schlein, Free The Children’s director of communications at (416) 925-5894 ext. 152 or at communications@freethechildren.com

What do you think?

The following discussion are currently taking place in The Hunger and Poverty Forums:

Who do you want to see run in ’08 and WHY?

You earned it. It’s yours.

Bush’s impeachable offenses.

Feeding the hungry is not the solution.

Effects of Forcing Western Thought on Others

Cost to End Hunger

What I can I do as a kid?

When is this country going to get serious about energy?

Registration is free, so register and discuss these topics and more!

Imagine sitting down to talk with eight mullahs in a village in central Afghanistan, meeting with people in the war-torn Gulu district in Uganda, or attending a town meeting of displaced persons in Colombia. How do people such as these, on the receiving end of international assistance, perceive humanitarian action in their respective countries? Is it fulfilling its intended purposes?

To identify the challenges that will affect humanitarian action over the next decade, researchers from the Feinstein International Center (FIC) at Tufts University traveled to Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan, Burundi, Liberia, and northern Uganda.

The FIC published a report about their findings, entitled The Humanitarian Agenda 2015: Principles, Power, and Perceptions. Read more about the report by the FIC.

In a recent article that I wrote I point out the serious and major problems facing our society and that we need radical change, both politically and socially. I then briefly run through the method to make that change. The called the article, Radical Change. Here’s a few relevant excerpts:

In the United States alone, 14 million children live in food insecure households. Globally, estimates say that 12 to 27 million people are in forced labor or slavery in the world today; most are female sex workers. Globally, 16,000 children die every day from hunger. Serious – and avoidable – social problems overrun the world.

[...]

We need to use our organized power to non-governmentally solve the problems that face us, which includes not only those inflicted directly by the oppressive status quo, but also any other problems ignored by the oppressive status quo and ignored by our negligent self-interested leaders. Thus we can use our power to solve the problems facing our particular communities, including such problems as poverty, hunger, rape, murder, assault, and illiteracy. Mainly, we need to create non-governmental alternatives to the pseudo-solutions and destructive services offered by the government and mega-corporations. For example, we have the power to create our own small, private, and non-governmental schools. We have the power to setup our own neighborhood watches to protect innocent people from victimization, including police brutality and misconduct. We can setup our own trade networks to actually provide the services that our communities actually need, including defense, education, babysitting, legal services, healthcare, and financial services. By organizing directly and avoiding paper money, we eliminate many opportunities for tyrants to steal our wealth.

We have the wealth and power. We just need to recognize that, and act accordingly. We need to work in a way to retain the wealth and power in our own communities, and we need to use that wealth and power to solve the problems of our own communities.

DJ BOBO, the internationally renowned Swiss artist and winner of around ten World Music Awards, today takes up his appointment as National Ambassador Against Hunger for WFP.

WFP is currently feeding six million people in Ethiopia, including 670,000 children thanks to its school feeding programmes.

Education remains the best way of escaping the vicious circle of poverty, illiteracy and hunger. In 2005, WFP enabled 21.7 million children in 72 countries to go to school.

Read more at alertnet.org.

Marc Haron juxtaposes war statistics in his new article, All I See Are Dead People. He compares the tragic Iraq war, which, so far, has led to over 30,000 or 650,000 Iraqi deaths, depending on how one counts. In fact, Haron doesn’t mention it, but more Americans have died in the Iraq war than 9/11. (I don’t know about you, but I feel less safe, meaning those brave American soldiers and American civilians died in vain.) Marc Haron also compares the tragic 9/11 attacks to the tragic deaths of starving children everyday, saying that it’s as if, everyday, sixteen planes flew into giant skyscrapers the size of the World Trade Center buildings, mostly full of children, killing everyone inside.

As horrific as the war in Iraq is, Iraqis aren’t the only ones on the planet who are dying. According to the United Nation’s World Food Program, every five seconds a child dies because that child is hungry.

We are not talking about war here, just everyday starvation. Children neglected by the warmongers in Washington and the finance capitalists on Wall Street. Children who could be saved, if it wasn’t for the fact that food goes primarily to those who can buy it, not to those who need it. Does that “trouble” and “grieve” Bush?

One child dead from hunger every five seconds. That’s twelve dead children every minute. That’s 720 dead children every hour. That’s 17,280 dead children every day.

The United Nations estimates that 25,000 people die every day from hunger and poverty. Obviously, a lot of them are children.

[...]

On September 11, 2001, five years ago, 3,000 people died. That changed everything, right?

Yesterday, 25,000 people died from hunger and poverty. It’s as if sixteen planes flew into giant skyscrapers the size of the World Trade Center buildings, mostly full of children, killing everyone inside.

That changed everything, right?

Probably not, because it happened again today, and will happen again tomorrow, and again, and again, and again.

If 25,000 people die every day from hunger and poverty, that means over 9 million die every year — 6 million of them children.

That’s one-and-a-half Holocausts every year. No gas, no deliberate murder. Just deliberate neglect.

By Thalif Deen – Inter Press Service

United Nations (IPS): Since hunger and famine are still widespread in parts of Africa and Asia, the international community is in violation of the right to food as a basic universal human right, according to a new study released by the United Nations.

“Despite promises to eradicate hunger, there has been little progress in reducing the global number of victims of hunger,” said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report.

More than 852 million people — about 13 percent of the world population — do not have enough food each day to sustain a healthy life, according to the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Of this, about 815 million people live in developing countries, 28 million in “transition” countries of the former Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet republics, and about nine million in the industrialized world.

“It is a shame on humanity that in a world that is richer than ever before, six million children due of malnutrition and related illnesses before they reach the age of five,” Ziegler said.

The study, which goes before the current 61st session of the General Assembly, points out that the majority of the hungry live in Asia and Africa, while about 80 percent live in rural areas and depend on agriculture and pastoralism to survive.

“They are hungry because they do not have enough work, or access to productive resources like and water sufficient to feed their families,” it says.

In a statement released Monday to commemorate both World Food Day and the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the world has the resources and the know-how to make hunger history. “What we need is political will and resolve,” he said.

Annan also said that a decade after world leaders pledged at the World Food Summit to halve the number of chronically undernourished by 2015, “the number has actually increased”.

Ziegler’s study says that all human beings have the right to live in dignity, free from hunger. “The right to food is a human right,” it stresses.

He also criticizes the “current massive under-funding” of U.N. programmes, especially in Darfur (Sudan), the Sahel (including Mali, Mauritania, the Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad) and the Horn of Africa (including Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Kenya) as “unacceptable”.

Outside of Africa, hunger and food shortages are also affecting countries such as Afghanistan and North Korea.

“All governments have a responsibility to respond to urgent (U.N.) appeals in relation to food crises,” says Ziegler.

Frederic Mousseau, a food security consultant for international relief organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger, says the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war state that victims of conflict, like the millions of displaced people in Darfur, must receive adequate food assistance.

“The international community has a legal obligation to provide emergency assistance in such a situation. Unfortunately, this form of assistance is commonly under-funded in most conflict zones,” Mousseau told IPS.

Often the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) has to cut food rations by half or delay distribution because of this lack of funding, he added.

“This is unacceptable because people who have lost their land or their job have no other option than to rely on external assistance for their survival,” said Mousseau, co-author of a new report “Sahel: A Prisoner of Starvation?” published by the San Francisco-based Oakland Institute.

In the case of Sahel and the Horn of Africa, which — apart from Somalia — are not countries at war, the problem is much wider.

On the one hand, he said, there is under-funding of relief assistance. For example the eight-month delay by the donor countries during the food crisis in Niger in 2005 resulted in 3.6 million people being starved.

“But more important we need to examine factors that lead to such severe food crises,” Mousseau said.

One of the primary reasons has been the absence of development policies geared toward providing support for rural development and small-scale farmers to ensure long-term food security.

Many countries have also been prevented by the donor countries and international financial institutions from implementing economic and trade policies that would support local producers and their markets, which could prevent a country from facing widespread hunger and destitution, Mousseau added.

In a world such as ours where there is enough food to feed everybody, I find it extremely inappropriate and shameful for anyone to go hungry. Yet, this happens! Even worse, you know something’s terribly wrong with the social structure when the people who produce the food suffer from that preventable hunger.

It gets even worse! Unfortunately, this problem mixes with child labor in the most disgusting of marriages. In her article, Children Hungry In A Land Of Plenty, Susan Levine points out that nearly 80% of children living on farms in the Worcester municipality participated in commercial agriculture during school holidays, on weekends or after school, but yet many children from these productive areas suffer from hunger and poverty, many have to beg, steal food or sniff glue as means to suppress their hunger.

Susan Levine continues by saying:

During the week, children who attend school and who are eligible for the feeding scheme (60% of children are reported to be hungry in the Rawsonville/Slanghoek region) look forward to their ration of two slices of bread and a glass of milk.

At one school, though, the teachers expressed their concern that not all the children receive food, and so children on the feeding scheme are asked to share their ration, which means that some might only have one slice of bread per day.

The increased rate of hunger among children in this rich agricultural belt is symptomatic of deep structural inequalities, and yet hunger is locally understood as the consequence of parental neglect.

The UN says that a 40 billion dollar increase in funding could feed, clothe and educate the entire world. Yet, the United States government spends 400 billion dollars a year on “defense” and spent over $310 billion extra so far on the Iraqi war. While almost half the world lives on less than $2.00 a day, the US people allow their government to waste resources imperialistically covering the globe with military troops:

Basic health, food, and nutrition for everyone in the world could be provided for the same amount that the people in the United States and Europe spend on perfume – about 13 billion dollars. However, that’s nothing compared to the US’s $400 billion military budget and the hundreds of billions more spent on the Iraq war.

Instead of feeding the 18,000 children who die from hunger every day, the US government does this:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Good rainfall in recent months has boosted harvests in arid Niger and reduced the risk of more hunger for a population that has long been vulnerable to food shortages, local authorities said.

According to the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP), about 70 percent of Niger’s 13 million people live below the poverty line and 3.8 million are undernourished.

Read entire IRIN article.