World Hunger,Do We Really Understand?.
When people in the United States go to the grocery store they have a choice of thousand of products including fresh meat, fruits, vegetables and diary products. Restaurants serve huge portions and we waste millions of pounds of food a year. It is hard for most Americans to even understand world hunger. At least a half a billion people suffer some form of malnutrition. In fact, about 40,000 to 50,000 people die PER DAY from malnutrition. In fact, 15 children have died in the 30 seconds it took you to read this paragraph. The four groups that suffer most from the effects of hunger and malnutrition due to nutrient needs or low tissue reserves are children, pregnant women, those who are ill and the elderly. In many countries, hunger is an obsession. .
The number of hungry and malnourished people in the world continues to grow. The problem is not over-population, it most often is based on economics. There are 800 million illiterates in the world. In many countries, half the population over 15 is illiterate and two-thirds of these are women. Only through education will we be able to move these people out of a poverty level so great that they have no money to buy food. Another challenge is the political agendas of many of the third world countries. There is a constant political interference in food production, food distribution and most of all food aid. Civil war, corrupt officials and greedy corporation all contribute to world hunger. The goal of peace and an awareness of human sensitivity need to be part of the equation in order to feed to the hungry. Science has created ways to solve world hunger. Crops now can grow and yield with the need for less water; they are larger than ever before and produce more for acre. These phenomena did not just happen. It is through science that hybrids are developed that produce more yields. But focusing on the increasing production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly concentrated distribution of the economic power that determines who can buy the food.
