World Hunger and Poverty

Jennifer Harris recently wrote an article about awWater project helps that alleviate world’s poverty

More than 270 Christian organizations in the Micah Network are working together to ensure the United Nations keeps the Millennium Development Goals designed to cut global poverty in half by 2015. First Baptist Church of Columbia is one such group, striving to be a prophetic voice reminding the world that God cares for the poor.

“We felt a call to answer the Micah Challenge,” said Susie Bennett, deacon at First Baptist Church. “We needed to respond.”

Since answering the challenge, the church has chosen a project each year that fits in with the Millennium Goals. The first year, the church partnered with Heifer International, an organization that seeks to end hunger. The church set a goal of $5,000, enough to fill one of the ark-shaped banks Heifer International uses as a fundraising tool. When the funds came in, however, the church had given a little over $10,000, doubling their goal.

This year First Baptist is working with WaterPartners International to provide clean and safe water to Mereta Elementary School and the Village of Sayshayto in Ethiopia. “Children under the age of five are dying so fast, and all because of a lack of access to clean, safe water,” Bennett said.

Read entire World & Way article by Jennifer Harris.

Projects such as these truly make a difference. The fight to end world hunger, poverty and homelessness depends on the decentralized participation of private citizens and grassroots organizations. The governments of the world do not solve the problems plaguing us and all of humanity. We the people need to take it in our own hands and follow the example set by active organizations such as First Baptist Church of Columbia and the other over 270 Christian organizations in the Micah Network.

What do you think?

The old ways don’t work. We need to work together and come up with new ways to effectively eliminate hunger and poverty. To that end, please come join the important discussions at the Hunger and Poverty Forums, where we discuss those topics plus other serious social issues such as education and healthcare. You can register, join and participate for free. We welcome all viewpoints.

Join the Hunger and Poverty Forums, because society cannot afford for us to remain silent about these issues!

forums.millionsofmouths.com

Daniel Costello and Abigail Goldman wrote an article about calls for healthcare reform:

An unusual new coalition of big employers, labor unions and politicians united Wednesday to push for “quality, affordable” healthcare for all Americans by 2012.

The proposal adds to growing pressure on Congress, President Bush and statehouses across America where governors including California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger are calling for a major overhaul of health insurance coverage.

The idea united some bitter adversaries Wednesday and indicates that there is business support for change.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest private employer, joined with one of its biggest critics, the Service Employees International Union.

There are currently 47 million uninsured in the U.S. and that number is rising by more than a million people a year. As health costs have almost doubled in the last seven years, many workers have seen most if not all of their pay raises go toward rising healthcare premiums.

Read entire Times article by Daniel Costello and Abigail Goldman.

With 47 million uninsured Americans and devastatingly high healthcare costs, we need to make drastic changes and reforms to our healthcare system. However, I do not think government-funded national healthcare can solve the problem. The inherent inefficiency and dishonesty of government means that federalizing healthcare can only make matters worse overall. We cannot afford to put the same people running the inefficient DMV in charge of our healthcare.

Additionally, Wal-Mart supports national healthcare simply because they want taxpayers to pay for Wal-Mart’s employees’ healthcare, instead of Wal-Mart.

Instead, we need to make companies like Wal-Mart pay their employees enough to afford healthcare and insurance. We can do this through non-governmental worker’s unions. Further, we need to create our own community-based health insurance organizations, instead of doing business with mega-corporations and the con-men who own them.

We cannot trust the corrupt and deceitful government. Instead, we need to use voluntary solidarity to create non-governmental organizations that actually address our problems and concerns effectively – truly by the people and for the people.

What do you think?

Catholic Online reports on criticism of the contrast between President Bushes cuts to social spending and his increases in military spending:

The proposed $2.9 billion U.S. government budget proposed by the Bush Administration is a moral document that misses the mark in reducing poverty, with draconic cuts that will hurt America’s poor families, said the president of the nation’s largest Catholic social service networks.

“The president’s budget misses the mark on reducing poverty in America,” said Father Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, the day after the fiscal year 2008 budget proposal was released Feb. 5.

“In fact, with cuts to key programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, the president’s budget will only serve to exacerbate the problems facing millions of our nation’s poor families,” Father Snyder said, noting that there are “drastic cuts and changes” to a range of programs that address the health and well-being of low-income families and individuals.

President George W. Bush is seeking to rein in domestic spending as part of a plan to balance the budget in five years without raising taxes while increasing funding for the Iraq war and permanently expanding the military.

The $2.9 trillion budget attempts to tighten spending on health care, education, housing and other domestic programs during the last two years of the Bush Administration. The new budget seeks to reduce the rate of growth in Medicare and Medicaid, cutting $101 billion from both over the next five years.

Read entire Catholic Online article.

Yet, Bush’s budget can afford unnecessary trillion dollar oil wars!? Instead of taking care of the hungry, poor, and sick at home, the Bush Administration and neo-conservatives throw trillions of dollars at the type of militarism that makes the world hate the United States, and makes the United States the target of deranged terrorists.

Poor hungry kids go hungry on the streets and senior citizens can’t afford their medication, while the military industry, Big Oil, and Halliburton cash their billion dollar paychecks.

This just goes to show why we cannot trust the government with our money. We cannot rely on the government to solve our problems. If we want to get such necessities as food, clothes, shelter, education, healthcare, safety, and security, we need to do it ourselves. Stop letting this negligent and corrupt government steal our money through taxation! On our own, let’s put our labor and our money towards providing food, clothes, shelter, education, and healthcare to ourselves, our friends, our families, and our communities.

In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau said:

“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

What do you think?

PBS recently published an article with facts about homelessness in the United States. I include an excerpt about the causes of homelessness.

Homelessness may be caused by a variety of factors, but the coincidence of increased levels of poverty and decreased numbers of affordable housing often to blame. Other notable causes may include:

• Lack of healthcare
  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2004 nearly a third of persons living in poverty had no health insurance of any kind. The coverage held by many others would not carry them through a catastrophic illness.
• Domestic violence
  In 2005, 50 percent of the cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors identified domestic violence as a primary cause of homelessness.
• Mental illness
  Many mentally ill homeless people are unable to obtain access to supportive housing and/or other treatment services. A 2005 U.S. Conference of Mayors study found that about 22 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness.
• Substance Abuse
  While recent research questions the disproportionately high rates of alcohol and drug abuse among the homeless population, and no agreed-upon statistics exist, poor people who abuse substances are far more likely to experience homelessness than their sober counterparts.

Read entire PBS article.

Unfortunately, homelessness rates for families and children continue to rise. Such homelessness denies children the type of childhood conducive to a successful life. By neglecting to properly house, nourish and educate these children, society leaves these children unprepared for adult life, trapping the children in a life of poverty.

What do you think?

Katharine Hall And Jo Monson posted an article about South African Poverty. They say that help for poor children ends too early.

In South Africa the majority of children are born into poor households. Poverty is associated with unemployment and exacerbated by low levels of education, and so the stage is set for yet another generation to remain trapped in poverty.

There are a number of government programmes designed to support children in households with little or no income. These include the child support grant, free schooling in poor areas, a school fee exemption policy and a national school nutrition programme. But at present, children aged 14 to 17 are excluded from the range of government policies, targeted toward younger age groups.

Teenagers are at an important developmental phase. Investment in their wellbeing and especially their education will have positive effects on their lives and may help break the cycle of poverty.

Read entire allAfrica article by Hall and Monson.

Sadly, these children have potential, but the lack of adequate access to necessities, such as education, food, clothes, and shelter, traps these children into poverty.

Unfortunately, this problem exists all over the world. Even in the United States, half of all children born into poverty will remain in poverty. These means that they remain in poverty not because they as a result of never receiving a fair chance to reach their potential.

We need to put an end to this non-meritocratic classism. We need a world in which all people have opportunity. We can create such a world by providing all children access to food, clothes, shelter, and education.

What do you think?

Peg Tyre and Matthew Philips report on the growing problem of suburban poverty:

Once prized as a leafy haven from the social ills of urban life, the suburbs are now grappling with a new outbreak of an old problem: poverty. Currently, 38 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defines as an annual income of $20,000 or less for a family of four. But for the first time in history, more of America’s poor are living in the suburbs than the cities—1.2 million more, according to a 2005 survey. “The suburbs have reached a tipping point,” says Brookings Institution analyst Alan Berube, who compiled the data. For example, five years ago, a Hunger Network food pantry in Bedford Heights, a struggling suburb of Cleveland, served 50 families a month. Now more than 700 families depend on it for food.

Suburban poverty can also be invisible. Poor people who live in the city tend to be concentrated in subsidized housing or in neighborhoods where the rent is low, which in turn attract retail businesses that target customers with low incomes. Poor suburbanites often live in the same ZIP codes as their affluent neighbors, shop at the same stores and send their children to the same public school. And if people don’t see themselves as poor, they often don’t seek the help they need.

Read entire Newsweek article.

Sadly, the official numbers underrate the problem. For example, take a single-parent making $21,000 a year and trying to support three kids with the substandard public school systems of lower-middle-class America; the government considers them above the poverty line.

Additionally, the majority of supposedly well-off working-class families live in debt.

Anyway, suburban poverty shows once again that this massive social problems – poverty, hunger, and homelessness – affect all of us. We all need to organize and work together to put an end to these social ills.

What do you think?

It seems a dozen renowned celebrity chefs accepted a challenge to make cuisine out of CSB, a cheap bland substance usually given to the world’s poorest people by humanitarians.

CSB stands for corn soya blend, the same vitamin-enriched food-ration substance that humanitarian aid workers truck through mine fields in Afghanistan and air drop from C-130s into Sudan. It is generally distributed in 25-pound canvas bags and made into mush or porridge under the dire conditions of war, famine and natural disaster. On its own, it has virtually no flavor, but it does provide crucial daily nutrition with little more than a few drops of water and even the most rustic mortar and pestle[...]

The idea to use those who literally cater to the rich to bring attention to the world’s poorest people was born of a struggle to find the common ground among those whose job it is to feed people—whether they are gourmet chefs or humanitarian aid workers, says the project’s creator, Jonathan Dumont of the World Food Program in Rome. “Despite the fundamental common goal of feeding people, the bottom line is that one type eats for pleasure and art and the other eats to survive,” he says. At first Dumont worried that it would be hard to find top-notch chefs willing to participate. But, instead, he says, “the overwhelming enthusiasm of the chefs who have already contributed, or have agreed to contribute to the project, made me realize that this is actually a way of unifying the poorest people on the planet with the richest.”

Read entire Newsweek article by Barbie Nadeau.

This event has much potential to raise awareness about the important issues of hunger and poverty. I even imagine that the chefs will tell this memorable story long afterwards. Although the quirky challenge seems fun, it also highlights the saddening gap between rich and poor.

What do you think?

The Independent recently released an article that says birth rates must be curbed to win war on global poverty:

The earth’s population will approach an unsustainable total of 10.5 billion unless contraception is put back at the top of the agenda for international efforts to alleviate global poverty. A report by MPs released today challenges world leaders to put the contraceptive pill and the condom at the centre of their efforts to alleviate global poverty, tackle starvation and even help to avert global warming.

Read entire Independent News article.

Unfair distribution causes the world hunger and poverty problem, not overpopulation. We know this, because the world currently has more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. However, population growth puts that reality at risk. Continued population growth may hinder the world’s ability to reach the goals of ending poverty and hunger.

Unfortunately, growth seems highest among the poorest groups and in poorest and most desolate places. This happens for many reasons. For one, many poor people lack education and/or access to birth control. Also, many poor people see childbirth as an asset, because they can use the extra pair of hands to put to work on farms and such. In places with high infant and child mortality rates, parents need to give birth to more children as to make up for the ones that will likely die.

What do you think?

Rafiqul Islam Azad reports on an international workshop about hunger:

Speakers at an international workshop in Chennai, India [last Monday] stressed the need for formulating an strategy at aggregate level to ensure food security across the globe.

The four-day workshop on “Food Insecurity: A Great Threat to Human Security”, organised jointly by International Student Young Pugwash (ISYP) and MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) was inaugurated by ISYP President Prof MS Swaminathan.

Over one hundred experts, researchers, academicians, agriculturists, lawyers, journalists, government officials and representatives from donor agencies and NGOs are taking part in the workshop.

Read entire article by Rafiqul Islam Azad.

It makes me glad to hear the workshop, even though I could not attend. Nonetheless, I hope we do more than just talk about the problem. I hope we also carry out a plan to end world hunger.

What do you think?