Hunger Rose In U.S. In 2005

…according to the USDA report, more than 35 million people were living in households that are “food insecure.” That means 12 percent of the U.S. population didn’t get enough to eat for at least part of last year.

According to the report, things got even worse for those who are worst off. The number of people in the USDA’s “very low food security” category–households in which “the food intake of some household members was reduced and their normal eating patterns were disrupted”–rose in 2005 to 10.8 million.

Hunger rates were higher for Black households (22.4 percent) and Hispanic households (17.9 percent) than the national average.

IN SPITE of the Bush administration’s claim that the economy is strong, food pantries and soup kitchens report being stretched to the breaking point.

In Battle Creek, Mich., the Food Bank of South Central Michigan is using leftover food from restaurants to fill the gap between the needs of hungry people and what corporate and private donations will buy. “This is what we call ‘deep diving,'” Teresa Osborne, who leads the food bank’s donor and community relations program, told the Chicago Tribune, describing collecting discarded food from local restaurants.

At the same time as the need has increased, federal food assistance to pantries, in the form of commodities like milk products and canned goods, is down about 55 percent since 2001.

Read entire Counter Punch article by Elizabeth Schulte.

This demonstrates the way in which government never solves the hunger & poverty problem. Accordingly, it also demonstrates the futility of our appeals to government. Quite frankly, a government will only give people enough to make them dependent on the government. Similarly, generally the people in power will never empower the impoverished and disenfranchised people. Naturally, the people in power do what helps themselves and what allows themselves to retain or increase their own power. If we want to solve the problems facing our communities and world, such as hunger and poverty, we have to do it ourselves through voluntary cooperation and non-governmental organizations, such as private charities and local trade networks.

I agree with Elizabeth Schulte that we have serious problems facing us and our world, such as hunger and poverty. I agree with Elizabeth Schulte that these problems need immediate attention, and that our society needs change. However, the government will not cause this change, and only makes our society’s problems worse. Thus, I disagree with Schulte when she suggests implementing or increasing government programs and subsidies.

Nonetheless, her well-written article raises many good points and contains many enlightening facts. For example, I agree with her when she says the following:

EVERY DAY, people are forced to make what could be life-and-death decisions, based on poverty.

According to America’s Second Harvest’s Hunger in America Study 2006, 42 percent of the people they serve had to choose between paying for food and paying for utilities or heating fuel. Thirty-five percent had to choose between paying for food and paying their rent or mortgage.

It makes no sense, in a country with so much wealth and resources, that a single person goes hungry.

[…]

No one should ever have to make the decision between food, shelter or other fundamental human needs.

What do you think?

Nobel Laureate: Poverty Fight Essential

Economist Muhammad Yunus accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Sunday for his breakthrough program to lift the poor through tiny loans, saying he hoped the award would inspire “bold initiatives” to eradicate a problem at the root of terrorism.

Yunus, a 66-year-old Bangladeshi, shared the award with his Grameen Bank, which for more than two decades has helped impoverished people start businesses by providing small, usually unsecured loans known as microcredit.

“We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time,” Yunus told hundreds of guests at City Hall in Oslo, Norway. “I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns.”

Economics winner Edmund S. Phelps was cited for research into the relationship between inflation and unemployment, giving governments better tools to formulate economic policy.

Read entire AP article by Karl Ritter.

We have previously blogged about microfinance loans and the Grameen Bank. (See: Fighting Poverty $1 At A Time.) In addition to the above article, you can check out the Grameen Foundation Website.

I see the greatest aspect of the microcredit philosophy as the fact that it helps people help themselves. With just a small loan, the Grameen Bank enables its clients to permanently escape poverty through their own businesses and labor. This works much more effectively (and cheaply) than other methods which involve just throwing money and food at the problem. In fact, just dumping food into these malnurished communities often hurts them, because it undermines the local markets. In contrast, microloans stimulate the economies of these places by giving these underprivileged people the opportunity to help themselves and develop their businesses.

What do you think?

Human Rights Day and World Poverty

10 December 2006 marks the 58th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. During the last 60 years many achievements have been made in the name of human rights, but considerable challenges still remains to be fulfilled in making human rights an irreversible reality in the world.

[…]the fact remains that around 3.2 billion people still live on less than $2 a day, which might be the correct estimate of today’s poverty. “Poverty is more than just a lack of income,” the UN has declared (A Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies, UNHCHR, 2002). “It is also the lack of health care, education, access to political participation, decent work and security.”

It is admirable that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has identified poverty as the gravest challenge of human rights today in her 2006 pre-Human Rights Day Statement. It goes as follows: “Today, poverty prevails as the gravest human rights challenge in the world. Combating poverty, deprivation and exclusion is not a matter of charity, and it does not depend on how rich a country is. By tackling poverty as a matter of human rights obligation, the world will have a better chance of abolishing this scourge in our lifetime. Poverty eradication is an achievable goal.”

What might be necessary for poverty eradication is to make sure first that no one dies of hunger. But this is far from the world reality today. Among the poor, overwhelming majority are young and children (both girls and boys), because the poor normally don’t grow old. The second important task is to make sure that children go to school and get education, of course ensuring at least basic health care and housing for them as well as their parents. When they grow up, these children should be trained with the skills needed to acquire jobs or seek self-employment, in addition to facilities for those who are willing and capable of seeking higher education.

Read entire Asian Tribune article by Professor Laksiri Fernando. 

I highly recommend you follow the above link and read the entire article, not just the excerpt that I have included. In it, Professor Laksiri Fernando explores the statements of the UN, and expresses information about social inequality – such as that the world’s largest economies are corporations, not nations – and he explains the steps required to put an end to hunger and poverty.

Unfortunately, in the last 58 years since the declaration of human rights, hunger has continued to plague humanity. Innocent children suffer and often die in the agony of hunger and poverty. In fact, 16,000 children die of hunger every day. Even in the United States, 14 million children live in food insecure households. It seems the UN lacks the capability to solve this problem. The governments of the world have more interest in putting tax-dollars to military spending, going to the moon, enforcing drug laws, etc., rather than feeding and educating innocent children who suffer from preventable poverty and hunger, and preventable diseases.

Thus, if we want to solve these problems, we the people have to do it ourselves. We need to stop appealing to negligent governments, and instead create non-governmental organizations and solve these problems ourselves through voluntary solidarity. Our governments and politicians have no interest in solving our problems, so the only effective solution comes from grassroots activism. To that end, I highly recommend the book Globalize Liberation: How To Uproot The System And Build A Better World by David Solnit.

What do you think?

S.C. Hunger Rate Leads U.S.

About 6.3 percent of households in South Carolina – roughly 100,000 families – had “very low food security,” according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study issued last month.

That means normal eating patterns were disrupted and some had less to eat.

The percentage is the highest in the nation and well above the U.S. average of 3.8 percent.

“If you look at transportation and livable wages, South Carolina is really not doing well,” said Susan Berkowitz, director of the S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, another anti-poverty advocacy group.

“We have high levels of uninsured, low levels of education. It just all adds up.”

The USDA and Legal Justice Center reports don’t indicate South Carolina families regularly go without food.

Instead, advocates say the working poor rely more on aid agencies and programs for food as they use more of their modest income on increasingly expensive needs such as transportation and health care.

Read entire Sun News article.

South Carolina needs to unify and fix these problems in their state, which as the article points out extend beyond hunger and poverty. Hunger and poverty are just symptoms. All of us, including South Carolina, cannot solve the problem by attacking the symptoms. We need to take all the factors into consideration, including education, healthcare, and employment opportunity. Even high employment rates mean little when the jobs fail to pay enough for the workers to support themselves, and avoid hunger and poverty.

We all need to heed that advice, because this problem not only exists in South Carolina, but also exists at the national and global level. Let’s continue the war on poverty and hunger long after the holiday season.

What do you think?

U.S. Poverty Moves To Suburbs

The suburban poor outnumbered inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas released today.

“Economies are regional now,” said Alan Berube, who co-wrote the report for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “Where you see increases in city poverty, in almost every metropolitan area, you also see increases in suburban poverty.”

Nationally, the poverty rate leveled off last year at 12.6 percent after increasing every year since the decade began. It was a period during which the country went through a recession and an uneven recovery that is sputtering in parts of the Northeast and Midwest.

The federal government defined the poverty level as $15,577 for a family of three in 2005.

The poverty rate in large cities (18.8 percent) is higher than it is in the suburbs (9.4 percent). But the overall number of people living in poverty is higher in the suburbs, in part because of population growth.

In 1999, the number of poor people living in cities and suburbs was roughly even, at about 10.3 million each, according to the report. Last year, the suburban poor outnumbered their urban counterparts by about 1.2 million.

Cleveland was the city with the highest poverty rate last year, at 32.4 percent. McAllen, Texas, was the suburb with the highest poverty rate, at 43.9 percent.

Read entire AP article.

It’s hard to imagine a family of three of living on a 16 thousand income, but such a family wouldn’t even be considered poor with the low numbers the government uses to determine the poverty rate. With a more appropriate number, I imagine the suburban poor would outnumber the urban poor by even more; especially since the cost of living is higher for the suburban poor.

These new findings demonstrate that the problem of poverty isn’t some tiny foriegn issue affecting strangers. Poverty is a major widespread issue affecting our own communities. In fact, most Americans live in debt. Although, obedient middle-class Americans can put food on their tables with credit-cards, an economic recession or a hike in interest rates could quickly bring back a new American depression and put physical hunger right into the lives of the average working-class American.

Americans could effectively eliminate this threat by making fundamental change to the economic status quo. This change doesn’t need to come from the government, but rather the American people can stop participating in the credit-based economic system and instead utilize habits that retain the wealth in the working-class communities. Currently, the working-class is trapped by a government-backed credit-based economic system in which a lazy unproductive ruling class (namely the bankers and corporate shareholders) weasel the wealth from the productive masses via theft and manipulation. Suburban poverty is a symptom of this non-meritocratic social inequality.

Imagine

Back in 1971, John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono let the world imagine a better world, with no need for greed or hunger. Watch the video of their song, Imagine:

Recently, A Perfect Circle has made a downbeat remix:

Unfortunately, I think the downbeat version fits our contemporary world more than Lennon’s original. It’s 2006, and 16,000 children die everyday from hunger while the rest of us roll out the red carpet for World War III. The world had more hope in Lennon’s time, but we lost our way and never brought the dream of the 50s, 60s and 70s to reality.