First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics

Today’s poverty-related book of the day is First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics by Graham Riches.

Here is the overview:

“Hunger and undernutrition are widespread in many advanced capitalist societies. Hunger is now publicly acceptable despite undermining common standards of human decency and abrogating the basic right of people to adequate food as guaranteed in domestic and international law. First World Hunger examines this crisis and the politics and practice of food security and welfare reform (1980-95) in five ‘liberal’ welfare states (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA). Through national case studies it explores the nature and causes of hunger, its neglect by governments, the breakdown of public welfare, the depoliticization of hunger as a human rights issue and the failure of New Right policies and charitable emergency relief to guarantee household food security. Alternative policies and strategies of public action directed at the abolition of hunger are discussed.”

You can easily buy First World Hunger and more at discount prices from BookCloseouts.

Poverty Book of the Day: Growing Up Empty

I have decided to start a book of the day series on this blog. Each day for the rest of the month, I intend to make a post about a poverty-related book that interests me. I have not read any of these books yet. (If I had, I would have already posted about them when I read them.) I hope to read most of them eventually, but it will take me a while since they will not be the only books that I will be reading.

Better yet, I assume some people reading these posts will purchase and read one or more of the books. From an activist perspective, I think it will be a great way to raise awareness and spread information about poverty. Also, I have a relationship with BookCloseouts, so, when any of you purchase any of these books from BookCloseouts by following the links that I post on this blog, then some of the revenue will help fund this blog.

I will still make my regular blog posts too. These poverty book of the day posts will be extra. 🙂

Anyway, today’s poverty book of the day is Loretta Schwartz-Nobel’s book, Growing Up Empty: How Federal Policies Are Starving America’s Children. Take a look at the overview:

“Growing Up Empty is a study of the hidden hunger epidemic that still remains largely unacknowledged at the highest political levels and ‘an unforgettable exploration of public policy, its failures and its victims’ (William Raspberry, Washington Post). Twenty years after Ronald Reagan declared that hunger was no longer an American problem, Schwartz-Nobel shows that hunger has reached epic proportions, running rampant through urban, rural, and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians and Jews, and nonbelievers alike. Among the people we come to know are the new homeless. Born of the “Welfare to Work” program, these working poor have jobs but do not make enough to support their families, such as the formerly middle-class housewife reduced to stealing in order to feed her children, or the soldier fighting on our front lines while his young wife stands in bread lines and is denied benefits and baby formula at a military health clinic. With skillful investigative reporting and a novelist’s humanitarian eye for detail, Schwartz-Nobel portrays a haunting reality of human suffering that need not exist. A call to action, Growing Up Empty is advocacy journalism at its best.”

Global Food Crisis Now an Emergency

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, “The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions.”

Rising prices have already raised the costs of the WFP’s current operations from $500 million to $755 million.

I assume the inflation comes from the rising price of energy, which has risen from increased demand and decreased supply.

Food prices have doubled over the last three years, threatening the economic conditions of millions of people throughout the world.

The world has enough resources to end world hunger and poverty, but I believe those problems will continue to get worse if we do not fix the social and political problems that allow them to occur. Like I have said before, if we do not fix our social structure soon, I fear we will end up doomed.

Getting Young People More Involved in Activism

Throughout my unprofessional studies of history and geopolitics, I have come to the conclusion that young people tend to start, push and lead the most effective and positive social movements. For example, consider the hippies, yippies, and such in the United States, namely in the 60s and 70s.

I believe young people tend to have the most compassion and the most principled and honest sense of justice. I believe young people become the most honestly upset by the world’s constant terrors and injustices, such as war, poverty, oppression, political inequality, violence and so forth. In this harsh, corrupt world, perhaps as people get older they tend to become corrupted and institutionalized. Perhaps age breeds complacency and tolerance of the horrible.

Not only do I propose we try to get the youth involved in poverty alleviation and other progressive social movements, but also I propose we try to turn these movements into youth movements.

Like many activists in the United States, I have often asked myself how we can bring back the social awareness and progressive momentum of the counterculture of the 1960s, a time marked by its heavy involvement of young people and their relative free-spiritedness, originality, sense of individuality and lack of corruption.

If you have any good ideas for getting the youth involved or if you know of any organizations already helping the youth get involved, please post about them in my World Hunger and Poverty Forums.

Poverty Causes Teen Sex Problems

Today, I just started reading the book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by Judith Levine. Not being specifically about poverty, Levine argues in the book that sex is not necessarily harmful to minors, and that trying to keep children ignorant about sex and puritanically abstinent often backfires.

So far, I have only read about two chapters of the book. In the short part that I have read, Levine points out that poverty causes many of the problems associated with sex. For example, poverty increases the rate of teen pregnancy, unwanted births, abortion, rape, sexual assault, child molestation and sexually transmitted diseases. Namely, that happens because poor children have less access to quality education and health services. Also, poverty and poor neighborhoods are conducive to violence and crime, which increases sex crime and sex violence.

While trying to hide sexuality from kids tends to backfire, poverty reduction would actually help reduce the rates of many sexual problems especially among minors.

I cannot fully recommend Harmful to Minors until I have finished reading it, but so far I like it very much.

Even if you have not read the book, you can discuss it and its topics in this thread at the Book and Reading Forums.

80 Percent of Poor Americans Work

I just read a good article by Wendi C. Thomas in which she says that 80 percent of poor Americans have jobs.

The article contains some personal anecdotes about a few poor people. And it aims to help dispel the myth that poor people are lazy and do not want better for themselves.

Wendi C. Thomas also brings up Martin Luther King’s Poor People Campaign. Unfortunately, he was assassinate before the completion of the campaign. According to Thomas, King’s Poor People Campaign demanded more jobs with a decent wage, better unemployment insurance and higher-quality public education to prepare children for the workforce.

She also included a quote by King that is unfortunately still very relevant today:

“Instead of spending $35 billion every year to fight an unjust, ill-considered war in Vietnam and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, we need to put God’s children on their own two feet.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We can now sadly say the same about the war in Iraq!

King’s ideas still apply very much nowadays, and so far we have left his mission utterly unfinished. For that reason, I intend to read The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign.

Do you know any other good books about Martin Luther King and his campaign to alleviate poverty? If he were alive today, how do you think Martin Luther King would try to eradicate the large amounts of poverty? Please post your answers to those questions and your other thoughts on the subject in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.