Today is Unite For Hunger And Hope day. It’s a simple concept that bloggers everywhere post about global hunger to raise awareness of the situation. From the Unite website, here are a few facts and figures:
• Right now, more than 500 million people are living in “absolute poverty” and more than 15 million children die of hunger every year.
• World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the population is underfed and another third is starving.
• Even in the United States, 46 percent of African-American children and 49 percent of Latino children are considered chronically hungry.
There is enough money and enough food in the world right now to end global poverty and hunger, if countries would pull together and make it happen. First world countries are greedy and full and that makes it hard to recognise what it must be like to not know where your next meal is coming from. I’m very late to this party and don’t really have much to add of any substance, other than putting my hand up to be a part of a solution. Try to be aware of the food you buy and eat and see if you can only buy from your own country’s production, instead of buying produce that’s been stolen from the mouths of starving families and shipped around the world. Awareness is the beginning of solutions.
(Hat tip to Michael for this one).
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Kudos for posting. The only thing that set off my red flag is this WHO stat that 1/3 are starving and 1/3 are underfed: this seemed way too high and inconsistent with the stat above (500M in poverty). I couldn’t find the source of the stat, looks like an urban legend, it’s probably closer to 700-900M starving.
As for malnourished it would depend on how you measure — there’s probably few who aren’t deficient in something.
Isn’t buying food from your country of origin only going wa-ay too far? Usually the food taken out of the market is grain used to feed animals — but poor countries often rely on exporting the more expensive items to subsidise their economies (eg. snowpeas from Zimbabwe).
Feeding everyone properly MUST involve different regions growing what they can grow best and selling to an efficient distribution system. And alas for some it must also involve GM foods, nuclear power and some other demons-of-the-left
Yeah, the figures seem a little contradictory. But not having anything better to hand I can only supply the figures posted at Unite.
Buying food from home may be a simplistic answer, but it does help to highlight the ridiculous amount of shipping, packaging and so forth that goes into everyday consumables.
Found something:
http://www.who.int/mdg/goals/goal1/nutrition/en/index.html
It says food insecurity threatens 800M, a lot less than a third of the world (or 2/3) — and if someone is starving they’re definitely threatened by food insecurity so it can’t be a matter of wording!
Shows that hysteria and bad data are part of the problem too