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In essence, hunger
is the most extreme form of poverty, where individuals
or families cannot afford to meet their most basic
need for food.
Hunger manifests
itself in many ways other than starvation and famine.
Most poor people who battle hunger deal with chronic
undernourishment and vitamin or mineral deficiencies,
which result in stunted growth, weakness and heightened
susceptibility to illness.
Countries in which a large portion of the population
battles hunger daily are usually poor and often
lack the social safety nets we enjoy, such as soup
kitchens, food stamps, and job training programs.
When a family that lives in a poor country cannot
grow enough food or earn enough money to buy food,
there is nowhere to turn for help.
Click
here to read the rest of these facts and check
the sources.
Here are some more
links on world hunger:
World Food ProgrammeWorld
Hunger.org
America's
Second Harvest: Food Banks
The
Guardian newspaper's special report on the famine
situation in Niger.
Famine
Overview
"The
greatest challenge we face is how are we going
to feed a growing population and maintain a healthy
environment?" Dr. John Niederhauser, winner of
the 1992 World Food Prize.
This
section deals with the historical record of failure
of the food supply or the politics of food distribution
to feed masses of people resulting in famine and
migration.
It also focuses on the politics of hunger, which
appear to be based on income level and station
in life rather than availability of food stocks.
Famine
in Recent History
Famines
and near famines have occurred on all continents
and throughout history. Some of the worst in modern
times include:
Niger & Darfur--2004-2005
North Korea--1990's
--The famines of NE Africa in the 1980's
--Biafra in the '60's
--Cambodia in the '70's
--Many Chinese famines including the one after
The Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962,
--The Stalin era famine in the Soviet Union, esp.
in Ukraine,
--The Seige of Leningrad during WWII.
Questions
What
are the lessons we can learn from historic famines?
Are there any similarities in the origins of famines
in recent history?
What is being done to avoid future famines?
Sources
Becker,
Jasper. Hungry
Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine: the first full account
of the tragedy that claimed over 30 million victims.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
(This book contains a chapter
devoted to the anatomy of hunger or starving to
death and describes what exactly happens to famine
victims.)
Dolot, Miron.
Execution by Hunger: Survivors of Ukraine Famine
in 1932.
Hunger
& Politics
Overview
Most
people would agree with George McGovern that hunger
is "a political condition." So as with anything
political, there is a near endless amount of controversy
regarding this issue.
McGovern has been the US ambassador to the UN
Agencies on Food and Agriculture for the Clinton
administration. His book The Third Freedom: Ending
Hunger in Our Time is the latest call for action
on this subject. Here are some excerpts from his
introduction:
Hunger
is a political condition. The earth has enough
knowledge and resources to eradicate this ancient
scourge. Hunger has plagued the world for thousands
of years. But ending it is a greater moral imperative
now than ever before, because for the first time
humanity has the instruments in hand to defeat
this cruel enemy at a very reasonable cost. We
have the ability to provide food for all within
the next three decades. When I ran for the presidency
in 1972, 35 percent of the world's people were
hungry. By 1996, while the global population had
expanded, only 17 percent of the earth's people
were hungry---half the percentage of three decades
ago.
Here
are the basic points of his plan to end world
hunger:
(Taken from the book's dust jacket.)
- The
US should take the lead within the UN in working
toward a universal school lunch program.
- The
American supplemental nutrition program for
low-income women, infants and children should
go worldwide.
- The
UN must establish food reserves around the globe.
- Developing
countries must be assisted in improving their
own farm production, food processing and food
distribution.
- High
yielding, scientific agriculture, including
genetically modified crops, must be further
encouraged and developed.
McGovern
asks two questions:
What
would it cost for the nations of the world, acting
through the UN, to end hunger?
What will be the cost if we permit hunger to continue
at its present level?
Another writer, Wendell Berry, asks another
important question in his essay entitled "What Are
People For?" Richard Manning in his book Food's
Frontier: the Next Green Revolution condenses Berry's
concerns.
The
farmer-poet Wendell Berry cast the root question
best as one of efficiency, as set in the American
experience. More than half the US population lived
on farms at the turn of the century, just as more
than half the developing world's population now
does. Today less than 1 percent of the United States'
population are farmers. We are told that technology's
efficiency made farmers superfluous, so they moved
off the land. The process continued in cities, where
technology made human labor superfluous. In the
US we can ignore the effects by simply ignoring
the urban poor who remain and the masses of unemployed
in the megacities of the developing world. So if
people are no longer needed on the farms and therefore
sent to cities, where they sit idle in great sprawls
of tin shacks, how does the system of technology
serve humanity as a whole? That was Berry's question
in a short and vital essay entitled "What Are People
For?" That is as good a way of asking the central
question as any I can devise.
Sources
Bennett,
Jon. The
Hunger Machine: The Politics of Food. New
York. Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Clark,
Robert, editor. Our
Sustainable Table: Essays. San Francisco.
North Point Press. 1990.
Copeland,
Ross. "The Politics of Hunger" www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1500rs.html
Ehrlich,
Paul and Anne. The
Stork and the Plow: The Equity Answer to the Human
Dilemma. NY: Putnam, 1995.
Lappe,
Frances Moore. Food
First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. NY: Ballantine
Books, 1978.
World Hunger: Twelve
Myths. NY: Grove Press, 1986.
Manning,
Richard. Food's
Frontier: The Next Green Revolution. NY:
North Point Press, 2000.
McGovern,
George. The
Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time.
NY: Simon & Schuster, 2001
Poppendieck,
Janet. Sweet
Charity: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement.
NY: Viking, 1998.
(From the dust jacket: "Sweet
Charity is a beautifully written, deeply compassionate
work that breaks new ground in understanding the
emotional basis, as well as the history and economics,
of public and private food assistance programs in
the US today.")
Breadlines: Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance
in the Great Depression
Rosset,
Peter. "The Case for Small Farms" www.foodfirst.org
Tansey,
Geoff. The
Food System: A Guide. London: Earthscan,
1995.
World
Food Day U.S. National Committee for the World Food
Day (October 16) 2175 K Street, NW Washington, DC
20437 202 653 2404 fx 202 653 5760
Internet
World Food ProgrammeWorld
Hunger.org
America's
Second Harvest: Food Banks
The
Guardian newspaper's special report on the famine
situation in Niger.
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