World Hunger and Poverty

by Scott Hughes

The yew year comes whether we want it to or not. Without fail every year, all of us a year older celebrate the coming of a new year on New Years Day, and we wish ourselves a good year.

What’s so new about it, though?

As we close this year and tally up the millions of children who died of hunger, I have no doubt that millions more will die next year. In the so-called new year, AIDS will continue to spread. In the so-called new year, we will still blow ourselves up with bombs, missiles and other weapons, instead of building schools and educating the children. The new year will still deprive billions of innocent people the opportunity to gain healthcare, education, food, and employment.

I see nothing new about the coming year. I see the same traits in the coming year as the past year, and all the years before that. I see the same pain, hunger, poverty, disease, and unhappiness. I see the same neglectful and apathetic public. I see the same non-meritocratic social inequality. I see the same prevalence of coercion, violence, hate, and loneliness. I see the same deficit of cooperation, love, and solidarity.

The United States government will still put the majority of its funds – stolen through taxation – towards Pentagon spending. Mega-corporations will still use politicians to oppress the masses, and the masses will continue to let it happen. The prison-industrial complex will still ensure that millions of poor and working-class people will still rot in prison – many for “victimless crimes”. Instead of changing the world and bettering their own lives, the working-class and the general public will continue to squander their power and indulge in self-destructive and short-sighted vices.

Consumers will still buy the petty material things from the malls and shops, as directed from TV commercials and billboards. We will still take drugs – both legal and illegal. We will still eat unhealthy and addictive foods, as we grow fat and depressed in front of the same television that brainwashes us into doing it.

We won’t better our lives by bettering the world in 2007. We will continue to make the few rich and powerful people in this corrupt world richer and more powerful, at our expense. We will buy fast-food, cigarettes and beer, and fancy cars, houses, and clothes on credit. We will still neglect our kids.

We don’t need a new year, we need a new era! We need a new era in which no child goes hungry, and no child lives in poverty. We need a new era in which all people have access to education and socioeconomic opportunity. We need a new era in which healthcare is everywhere and homelessness is nowhere. We need a new era in which HIV and AIDS no longer spreads. We need a loving and happy era.

We can celebrate the beginning of the new calendar one day every year, but we also need to change the world and make both the world and our lives permanently better.

A new year will come whether we want it to or not, but a new era will only come if we make it.

Let’s make a new era. Let’s get motivated and use love, patience, and dedication to create non-governmental organizations based on voluntary solidarity and voluntary cooperation to solve the many problems facing us and our world.

Let’s change the number of the year tonight, and change the world tomorrow.

Unlike wealthy neighborhoods dotted with banks and health food stores, low-income neighborhoods are often filled with pawnshops, check cashing outlets, payday loan outfits, and stores that rent furniture and appliances. Dollar menus draw many low-income folks into fast-food joints, while convenience store shelves are stocked with cheap solutions like soda, chips and sugary snacks.

These businesses offer high interest rates and bad nutritional choices, Cooper said.

“These institutions are predatory,” Cooper said. “(Low-income people) are in these lifestyles where they are underemployed, working two jobs, they are tired and just trying to keep the household running. They are not making healthy choices.”

Read entire Express-News article by Melissa Ludwig.

Melissa Ludwig explores the connection between poverty and unhealthy food choices in the article above. She also discusses programs that educate the poor about better food choices.

Unfortunately, the unhealthy habits of many poor people parallel the same unhealthy habits in many middle-class people. Because unhealthy food tends to have addictive qualities, corporations make more profits by pushing unhealthy foods onto the public – both poor and not – in the same way cigarette companies push addictive cigarettes onto the public. Corporations will always want profits, so if we want to improve our eating habits we have to do it ourselves.

Nobody can behave better unless they know better. Poor people tend not to have access to the same education, including education about health and nutrition. All in all, I see this nutrition issue as just another example of the importance of education in ending hunger and poverty, and making a better world for us all.

What do you think?

People are being urged by Scotland’s new chief scientific adviser to embrace genetically modified (GM) food as an answer to poverty, hunger and toxic pollution.

Professor Anne Glover, herself a genetic engineer, is urging consumers to ignore labels like “Frankenstein foods” because they are misleading and damaging. The potential benefits of GM crops are “huge”, she says, and the risks “extremely small”.

But her enthusiasm for GM food has infuriated environmentalists, who fear she could exert an important influence on Scottish ministers. They argue GM crops are “potentially dangerous” and point out that they have been widely rejected by the public and supermarkets.

The Scottish Greens’ environment speaker, Mark Ruskell MSP, has proposed a bill to Holyrood to make GM companies strictly liable for any economic damage caused by contamination from GM crop trials and commercialisation.

Read entire article by Rob Edwards.

I find it misleading to use hunger and poverty to support genetically modified foods, because there is already more than enough food to feed everyone in the world. The socioeconomic status quo causes hunger and poverty, not a lack of food.

Genetically modified food has benefits and drawbacks. Luckily, manufacturers can produce both, and individual consumers can individually decide which type of food they want. In a free-market, genetically modified food would probably sell for less than natural food. Customers can individually choose if they want to purchase and eat the cheaper GM food or the regularly priced regular food.

Regardless of whether they produce GM food or non-GM food, I want companies held liable to the rest of us for any damage they cause to our environment.

Nonetheless, GM food cannot solve hunger and poverty. Hungry and poor people do not need more food and resources in the market; Hungry and poor people need more money in their hands to purchase the foods and resources already at the market.

What do you think?

Food or rent? That is the daily choice faced by about 1.2 million of New York’s 8.2 million people.

Faced with that choice, mostly they pay rent and rely on emergency or charity food to survive, poverty activists say.

“It’s a struggle,” said 53-year-old Pierre Simmons, who has a part-time job, as he wrapped up a bagel from his soup kitchen lunch for later. “I have a job, but the cost of living is so high it makes it hard to buy food.”

Hunger is not unique to New York. More than 12 million U.S. households — or 35 million Americans — struggled with hunger in 2005, according to the U.S. government.

While the city’s Wall Street bankers are due to collect nearly $24 billion (12.3 billion pounds) in bonuses this year, more than one-fifth of New Yorkers are battling to make ends meet below the national poverty line of $10,000 a year for an individual.

One quarter of New York’s 1.9 million children are living in poverty, 40 percent of families with children had difficulty affording food in 2005 and one-fifth of the city’s children rely on free food to survive, according to a report by the Food Bank For New York City.

Read entire Reuters article by Michelle Nichols.

It’s a terrible shame that these people and children struggle with hunger in a place where food is readily available. Unfortunately, that shame extends from New York to the entire United States – the most socially unequal nation in the world. Indeed, the shame even applies globally. We live in a world where there is more than enough food to feed everyone; why do 16,000 children die of hunger every day?

We live in a world in which strong and smart people go hungry. Obviously, these struggling people want out of hunger and poverty, but non-meritocratic social inequality denies them the opportunity. When we acknowledge the rampant non-meritocratic social inequality that plagues the world, we realize that the majority of us – not just the lowest-class minority – are oppressed by it.

As Lila Watson once said, “If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

More than anywhere, New York epitomizes the non-meritocratic social inequality that plagues the world and keeps the working-class overworked, the hungry hungry, and the children starving.

What do you think?

Putting an end to homelessness can be done.

Not shelter it, feed it or clothe it. End it.

An intractable social problem — created by the economy, drug addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, the justice system, lack of health care — can be solved, [Bill Block] says.

King County has an estimated 8,000 homeless people, and Block is charged with finding a home for all of them.

Homelessness will end, the plan says, when we build a roof over every bed.

“It can be done,” Block said. “We see it all over the country.”

At its worst, the Ten-Year Plan is a naive campaign that gives false hope to society’s most downtrodden and will inevitably end in failure. At its best, it is wildly idealistic and maybe crazy enough to work.

To accomplish its goal, the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, an alliance of government, business and nonprofits, must create 9,500 units of housing. Its members — who include King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels — have given themselves a deadline of 2015.

Read entire Seattle Times article by Sharon Pian Chan.

I agree with Bill Block about the possibility to end homelessness, not only in Seattle, but I also believe we can end homelessness everywhere. The 8,000 homeless in King County only represent a fraction of the approximately 1 billion homeless people throughout the world. Nonetheless, our soceity can end hunger if the people of the world organize and actively fight hunger like Bill Block and the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. What do you think?

India’s newly declared war on junk food represents a sharp shift in direction for the government, which until recently had been inclined to believe that it made little sense to focus on the problems of overeating when people were still dying of malnutrition.

This week, however, [India's health minister] Ramadoss declared that the Health Ministry needed to wage a battle on two fronts, simultaneously fighting hunger and obesity.

His acknowledgment of these coexisting crises implicitly recognized the rapid emergence of two parallel Indias. He conceded that there was a growing gulf in the nation’s health concerns, a rift between the diseases of affluence and the diseases of poverty.

While the nation’s attention was caught up by the debate on how to stop India’s 300 million members of the middle class from bingeing on sugar-laden, fat-heavy diets, the National Family Health Survey was analyzing its latest data, which (when they are published formally next year) are expected to show that, despite the country’s economic boom, around 50 percent of Indian children under 5 are malnourished. Also, in some states of north India, the numbers of severely malnourished children are rising fast.

“We have one India which is galloping on the economic front, while in the other India, human development indices say we are 126th in the world,” Ramadoss said, referring to India’s low ranking out of 177 countries in the UN list.

“India is on its way to becoming a superpower, but unfortunately, 50 to 60 percent of children under 3 years are undernourished,” he told journalists covering a nutrition conference in Delhi, adding that he felt “ashamed” at the stark contrast in problems facing the nation.

“We have the IT revolution, but then we have this pitiful infant mortality,” he said. “We have on one side undernutrition and on the other side overnutrition.”

Read entire iht.com article by Amelia Gentleman.

The culture of gluttonous consumption causes these epidemics. Instead of engaging in self-beneficial activities and achieving long-term goals, the people of the world shortsightedly engage in self-destructive and addictive behaviors. That is why the overworked working class of the world labor and struggle but never seem able to create a better individual life for themselves or world for all. It goes beyond food, consumerism extends to an assortment of petty and often self-destructive crap, from TV to overpriced mall-bought clothes and fancy cars – most of which people buy on credit. The poor do the same thing: Instead of fighting to bring themselves and their communities out of poverty and oppression, these people often engage in these short-sighted and self-destructive behaviors such as drug use.

Thus, instead of having a happy meritocratic world, we have this problematic world in which on one side an obese person buying pharmaceutical drugs from the grocery store with her credit card, and on the other side a skinny crackhead starving in the street.

What do you think?

Progress on attaining the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which seek to tackle poverty, hunger and other social ills by 2015, remains slow but countries are realizing the importance of the life-and-death targets and increasingly know what needs to be done to attain them, the UN adviser on the project said today, sounding a note of optimism.

However Jeffrey Sachs, the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the MDGs, said he was under no illusion that while talk about the goals by donor countries or organizations was welcome, it means little unless concrete action is taken to back up their words.

The MDGs were agreed by world leaders at the UN’s Millennium Summit in 2000. They cover eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and fostering a global partnership for development.

Read entire UN.org article.

Unless the world makes fundamental changes to its approach to epidemics such as poverty, hunger, and disease, the world will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals. When analyzed under recognition of growing threats such as the depleting oil supply and increasing global militarization & violence, the slow progress on the MD Goals implies a more grim future. Hopefully, the world will soon make radical changes to its behavior towards its socioeconomic problems, and greatly accelerate progress on the MDGs.

What do you think?

The story of hunger in Vermont is told through vignettes: The father who forgoes food so his children have more to eat; the mother who cuts the milk with water to make it last longer; the child who is eligible for school food programs, but goes hungry rather than stand out as “poor” among the lunchtime crowd of peers.

The story of hunger in Vermont is told through statistics: About 23,000 Vermont households are hungry, according to the Campaign to End Childhood Hunger. That figure includes 21,000 children.

The number of Vermonters going hungry essentially doubled between 1999 and 2001, marking the sharpest increase in the nation.

Children are especially vulnerable. About 11 percent of Washington County children under the age of five live in families with an income below the poverty level; just under 2,000 households receive food stamps – less than half those experts believe are eligible for the nutritional help.

Hungry children begin to appear thin. Eventually their growth and development is slowed. They might experience health problems, cognitive dysfunction, and increased aggression.

The federal government officially designates these Vermonters as experiencing “food insecurity with hunger.” Call it what you want, it essentially means that some of our neighbors are in need of a helping hand to keep food on the table and their children fed.

The reasons for hunger are fairly well known. According to the Campaign to End Childhood Hunger, “poverty is the strongest predictor of hunger … lack of affordable housing, low wages, high unemployment, a decrease in the number of local, affordable grocery stores, and lack of public transportation” are contributing factors.

Read entire timesargus.com article.

Unfortunately, the problem of hunger and poverty extends beyond Vermont to the entire world. Similarly, the descriptions of hungry children suffering in Vermont apply to the children suffering throughout the world. I hope that not only Vermont, but also the entire world comes together to put an end to the terrible plagues of hunger and poverty, and provide equal opportunity to every person in the world, especially children.

The role of agriculture in addressing the [Africa's] economic development is a foregone conclusion. Business as usual will not improve food productivity on the continent. Africa needs to change its ways in order to be able to feed its people and ensure its main source of economic development – agriculture – grows and develops. Prosperity by the farmer will influence economic growth and the management and handling of other factors such as infrastructure. Innovative agriculture, acquired through novel relationships with technology developers, and developed through mutually satisfactory relationships with partners in research, development and commercialisation, should lead to prosperity for the smallholder farmer, to food security and economic growth for Africa.

“The world has declared war on hunger – but in Africa, images abound of pot-bellied, emaciated, wide-eyed and lifeless children – some still sucking their dead mother’s breasts – stretching out empty bowls for something anything to arrest the pangs of hunger they suffer; of vultures, waiting patiently for the only sign of surviving human life – the little boy on stick thin legs – to take his last breath before it pounces.”

“These are the images of Africa that speak of Africa and tell the African story. These are the images that splatter overseas media, from which Africa gains its reputation. But Africa can be beautiful. Where are the beautiful and melodious sounds of African children playing hoop, tending to their parent’s animals and playing tricks on each other? Where are the sounds of singing that fill the air as Africans celebrate bumper harvests or the marriage of their children or the coming of age of their youngsters? Where are the voices of women happily sharing stories as they harvest in the fields among chirping birds and children happily playing around them? Where are the images of the proud African peoples standing majestically and beautifully for all to see?”

“A revival of Africa’s agriculture is necessary for faster realisation of the continent’s development. But it requires commitment to genuine social change that will benefit the continent. Business as usual won’t suffice. A different approach to dealing with issues that have dogged the continent for years is required. To make a real difference in its current state, Africa should aim for a higher state of being in addition to attaining food sufficiency. It should aim to take up its rightful place in world trade and economy and to sit at the same table with the rest of the world as a contributor to issues relevant to the survival of the human race and it can only do this if it achieves its own economic development.”

Read entire allAfrica.com article by Max Amuchie.

I recommend following the above link to the three-page article by Max Amuchie, from which the excerpt is taken. In it, he describes the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), including the hunger and poverty problem in Africa and the method the AATF uses to work on solving it.

I think the article raises another point that extends from Africa to all the underdeveloped and/or impoverished places in the world: Generally, impoverished places and poor people have potential, but they just need the opportunity to develop and help themselves; Lest we forget the rich history of Africa, and the many scientific advances from that continent. Globally speaking, so-called “third-world” countries tend to be places abundant in resources, such as oil and diamonds, production, and hard-working peoples.

What do you think?

…the underlying question is: Why are we providing help for the needy only by treating the symptoms of poverty and hunger? What happens when the holidays pass and the poor are back where they were last year and the year before?

Being charitable and caring at any time of the year is wonderful. But if we never get at the underlying causes of poverty and hunger, we will never really help the poor and hungry among us.

Charitable organizations such as Gleaners, the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities can’t do it alone. Government policies that keep people in poverty and prevent them from opportunities for a decent living should be changed. The push for increasing the minimum wage is a good start. But why can’t this blessed, prosperous nation provide adequate health coverage for all, affordable housing for all and safe child care for those who need it?

Make a New Year’s resolution to urge your lawmakers to have the moral and political courage to pass legislation that will reduce and eventually eliminate poverty and hunger among the least of our brothers and sisters.

Read entire letter by Gerard Burford.

Mr. Burford makes a great point about the need to treat the causes and not the symptoms of hunger and poverty. However, government cannot do this. Indeed, government policies favor the rich and powerful, and we need to stop that. We need to stop government from contributing to problems such as hunger and poverty, and we need to stop government from preventing solutions to problems such as hunger and poverty. Nonetheless, government cannot solve these problems. Interfering policies such as minimum wages just increase divisiveness, and don’t truly solve the causes. Perhaps, private unions that non-governmentally negotiate with employers or corporations can help.