Norman Borlaug Recognized

According to the AP, agriculture scientist Norman Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal on Tuesday. Professor Norman Borlaug’s work on high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat spawned the Green Revolution and alleviated starvation in India and Pakistan in the 1960s.

Previously, Professor Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 after he founded the World Food Prize, an annual $250,000 award to people whose work increases the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.

I commend Professor Borlaug for successfully promoting increases in food production, but I want us to remember that the world currently has more than enough food to feed everyone. The hunger problem results not from a lack of food, but rather a lack of sufficient distribution.

Granted, food production will become more important as global population continues to increase.

Back Scratching

Do you have a blog of your own or a website?

If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I can give your blog  great exposure. If you post about this blog and provide a link, then I will list you as a supporter and link back to your blog. Simply post about this blog on your blog, and then tell me about it. Each week, I’ll make a post with a list of people who supported this blog.

Make sure you include a link to this blog, with the following URL:

http://millionsofmouths.com/blog/nfblog/

Also, write your thoughts about this blog, and perhaps poverty in general. It doesn’t have to be anything long. Take the following as an example:

Today I want to tell you all about the Hunger & Poverty Blog. It’s an important blog about hunger, poverty, and other serious social issues. 18,000 children die every day from hunger, and it’s time we all started to do something about it! I’m glad to give the Hunger & Poverty Blog my support!

Once you post about this blog, tell me and send me the URL of your post. You can tell me on the Hunger & Poverty Forums or by emailing webmaster@millionsofmouths.com.

Thank you!

Leading Scientist Says Climate Change Increases Poverty and Hunger

Lisa Schlein recently wrote ana article about a leading scientist who says that global warming increases poverty and hunger:

The chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, says the effects of climate change will be mainly felt in the areas of health and agriculture. He says it is the poor who would suffer most from the change.

He says heat waves in different parts of the world are making people ill and causing many deaths. He says the situation is particularly bad in poor countries that do not have the infrastructure or wherewithal to protect people from extreme heat.

Speaking of the agricultural effects of climate change, Pachauri says two-thirds of the world lives in rural areas and the majority of these people are in developing countries. He says a great many are dependent on rain-fed agriculture.

Pachauri says climate change would lead to an increase in precipitation in temperate areas, but a decrease in tropical and sub-tropical areas, where most of the people on Earth live. Those who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, he says, would be adversely affected by the decrease.

Read entire article by Lisa Schlein.

I have no doubt that mankind’s actions on earth have gravely contributed to the warming of the globe. Unfortunately, our society does not hold people responsible for the damage they do to the environment. I can go out today and smash the window of a car, which would likely result in society forcing me to pay to fix the damages I caused. However, if I go out and pollute the environment, society does not make me fix the damages.

Instead of choosing to do what protects the environment most, corporations unsurprisingly choose to do what makes them the most money. This industrial machine tears apart our planet in the name of industrial production. It will continue to consume and destroy everything until nothing remains. It will continue until it has uprooted all the trees, polluted the air and atmosphere beyond repair, and used up all the natural resources.

We, the people of the world, have to defend ourselves. We have to protect ourselves from those who try to pollute our environment and misuse the natural resources of our planet. Let’s organize, and use our organizational power to stop anyone and everyone from polluting our environment without responsibility.

Share your thoughts about the environment and global warming as they relate to hunger and poverty at the Hunger & Poverty Forums. You can join and discuss these issues for free, so please do that!

Offsetting Carbon

As we know, global warming threatens crops and global food production. As such, global warming relates with world hunger and poverty significantly. Beyond that, the same social stagnation and political corruption that keeps society from fighting man-made global warming also keeps society from fighting world hunger and poverty.

For those reasons, I gladly tell you about CO2Debt.com. The website allows people and businesses to offset their carbon emissions. The site offers a service by which people can pay organizations to decrease the carbon in the atmosphere. The website encourages people and businesses to calculate how much carbon they emit during their yearly activity, and then gives them the ability to easily offset it with a financial donation.

I commend CO2Debt.com for offering such great services.

I personally believe that one could argue for legally requiring people and businesses to offset their carbon emissions. If a person vandalizes a car, we make them pay for the repair of the car. For the same reason, if a person or company damages the environment, let’s make them repair it.

Include Education Costs

We need to consider education costs in the cost of living. In today’s world, a person cannot make enough money to survive without education and job training. (Job training includes learning business management, for those starting their own small business.) To get an education, most students need to take out student loans. These student loans need to include the cost of necessities such as food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare, because a person needs to survive comfortably to get educated properly. This leaves the student with debt. Thus, we have to consider this debt in the cost of living.

Normally, the cost of living refers to how much it costs for a person to afford the necessities of modern life–namely food, clothes, shelter and healthcare. If a person makes enough to afford those necessities, then we do not consider the person poor. If the person does not make enough to afford those necessities, then we do consider the person poor.

Since a person needs the education to make their income in the first place, we cannot reasonably consider a person non-poor if the person cannot afford to pay off their student loans, even if the person makes enough to pay for their current food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare.

Poor Single Mothers

In Louisville, Kentucky, many single mothers live in poverty. Marcus Green recently wrote about it and the need to spread affordable housing. I include an excerpt:

Experts say the importance of blending low-income residents into middle-income neighborhoods is that it offers better work and education opportunities for impoverished parents and children.

“In these high-poverty areas, there aren’t a lot of jobs, a lot of viable institutions” such as parks, said Karen Christopher, a University of Louisville sociologist. “When you’re raising a family, that’s what you need.”

Expanding affordable housing into middle-income and affluent neighborhoods won’t directly pull single-mother families out of poverty, but it could influence their aspirations and behavior, Christopher said.

The housing coalition’s analysis of U.S. Census data paints a stark portrait of households headed by women, showing that 37 percent of those led by single mothers are impoverished.

Read entire article by Marcus Green.

Unfortunately, in a world where most two-parent households struggle, a single-parent home faces overwhelming obstacles.

I agree that spreading affordable housing can help allow single-mother families to escape poverty, but we must accompany it with other forms of social change.

We can best reduce single-mother poverty through prevention. We have to teach even young children about the difficulty in raising children alone. Then, teach them how to avoid it. Too many women have children without the resources to take care of them, namely a non-deadbeat father. Too many males run away from their responsibilities, thus leaving a woman to take care of children by herself. Beyond all of that, society needs to stop breaking up families. For example, needless drug laws and needless wars lead to fathers getting thrown in jail or sent to war–often never to come back.

Of course, we cannot change the past. So, we have to take care of the poor single mothers already raising families alone. In addition to affordable housing, we need to ensure that they and their children get food, clothes, shelter, healthcare, education, and employment.