World Hunger and Poverty

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The tiny island nation of Sao Tome is about to unlock the wealth from an estimated 11 billion barrels of oil from the seabed beneath those same Atlantic waters. The government says the oil is the answer to this country’s grinding poverty.
Too often, in too many places across Africa, oil has only fomented despotism and […]

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES - Another sign of the new Washington: bipartisan
HIV testing.
At a world AIDS Day conference in California next month, two potential 2008 presidential rivals — Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. — will each take an HIV test and encourage others to do the same.
To reduce […]

by Scott Hughes
“The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition.” -Jim Motavalli
When studying the factors involved in world hunger, many overlook meat production and consumption.
I turned […]

Pope Benedict XVI, on Sunday, lamented increasing global hunger saying “hundreds of millions of people particularly children worldwide are hungry.”
The Catholic Pontiff described it as “a scandal, which must be combated by changes in consumption and fairer distribution of resources.”
Speaking from his studio window overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Benedict said that more than […]

Starvation and malnutrition are “fast becoming the twin perils” in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and the need for food soon might surpass the need for antiretroviral drugs among many HIV-positive people in the developing world, the AP/ABC2 News reports.
According to the U.N. World Food Programme, an estimated 3.8 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide needed […]

Global expenditure on “defense” [sic] has crossed the 1,000 billion US dollar mark and is still rising. The peace dividend of the end of the Cold War does not seem to have had the desired effect on global defense spending after showing some promise in the initial post-Cold War years, said an Indian minister here […]