Joe De Capua recently wrote a news article about the hidden costs of war. I include an excerpt:
The new UN General Assembly session opens next week, and there’s a call for the United Nations to address what one group calls the hidden costs of war. The NGO ActionAid says that of the food crises facing nearly 40 countries in mid-2006, 25 were caused by conflict.
Thomas Johnny is a policy research manager for ActionAid in Sierra Leone. He’s currently in New York, awaiting the UN meeting. He spoke to VOA English to Africa Service reporter Joe De Capua about the hidden costs of war.
“The hidden cost of war I can say one is hunger; two is the increased level of trauma and continuous deprivation of people; and people trying to recover from the loss of relatives, friends and even property. But I think hunger is one of the most hidden costs of war,” he says.
I agree completely. The movement called Food Not Bombs bases its philosophy on the relationship between war and hunger.
Not only does war directly cause hunger and poverty, but it also indirectly contributed to the problem. Namely, the huge expensiveness of war uses funding that could go to anti-poverty measures.
For example, the needless war in Iraq will cost the United States over a trillion dollars (and it has made the United States less safe, in my opinion). With 1 in 8 people in the United States suffering from poverty, imagine if the United States had put that trillion dollars towards funding food, clothes, shelter, healthcare or education, rather than war. Best case scenario, the United States government could have given that money back to the tax-payers instead of wasting it on needless wars. As it goes with all wars.