Hunger Threatens National Security

Julianne Malveaux recently wrote an elegent article connecting national security with hunger. I include an excerpt:

The war in Iraq, President Bush has said, is “of enormous importance to American security.” There’s another kind of security our president might want to focus on – food security at home.

To be sure, he mentioned hunger and poverty in passing during the State of the Union address, but only in the foreign policy context. Yet, 11 percent of all Americans are “food insecure,” which means they are hungry or living on the edge of hunger. That’s 12 million households – 35 million people, including 13 million children – who are too poor to eat balanced meals, or who skipped meals because there was not enough money for food.

Food insecurity in the United States is often recurrent but not chronic. In other words, the food insecure eat most days, but possibly not every day. They sometimes supplement their household food supply with charitable donations from food banks or community food programs. Some, but not all, of those who experience food insecurity are homeless.

Internationally, too, we could do more to fight hunger. Bush raised the issue obliquely in his State of the Union address, mentioning the Millennium Challenge Account and the “strength and generosity” of the American people. He might note that both domestically and internationally the fight to eradicate hunger has a direct bearing on our national security. Hungry people do desperate things, often for small sums of money.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about his “audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies.” Even though our nation celebrates King’s birthday, we lack his audacity and his focus on eliminating poverty and food insecurity both in this country and in the world.

Read entire Progressive Media Project article by Julianne Malveaux.

Hunger kills far more people than terrorism. Nonetheless, Julianne Malveaux seems to make the point – a point with which I agree – that the continued prevalence of world hunger and poverty causes and facilitates terrorism, because the anger, pain, and desperation of poor people to excuse or, even worse, promote violence and terrorism.

More significantly, I point out now that hunger and terrorism both mainly result from the same problem – the unfair and non-meritocratic inequality of the socioeconomic structures of the world. In other words, terrorism and hunger both exist in our society because our society lacks equal opportunity and thus unfairly deprives hard-working, (potentially) intelligent, and (potentially) strong people the ability to peacefully help themselves. In addition to leading to hunger, that deprivation leads to anger and desperation among the public, which in turn causes people to condone or even support terrorism.

I adamantly want innocent people defended from any form of offensive violence, coercion, or harm. Accordingly, I adamantly want terrorists stopped by any means necessary, including defensive force.

At least in the long-term, we can more effectively stop terrorism by attacking the causes of it, rather than continuously trying to kill and capture individual terrorists.

The worst terrorism and violence comes from governments and organizations. Large groups of angry and desperate people elect, empower and support such governments and organizations. As a result, when we hunt down single terrorists, terrorist organizations or terrorist governments, new terrorists just take the place of the old ones.

We can neither reduce nor eliminate terrorism without the type of diplomacy, activism, and cooperation that reduces the amount of anger and desperation in the public. Let’s work to simultaneously eliminate hunger, poverty, and terrorism.

What do you think?