World Hunger Essay, Research Paper

Hunger is an issue which many people think lies little importance. Im going to give you a look at World Hunger as a Picture of Poverty, how it affects Third World Nations, and How World Hunger is a disease that is plaguing our society.

“Food is more than a trade commodity,” pleaded Sir John Boydorr in 1946. “It is an essential to life.” The first director-general of the new Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Boydorr fruitlessly proposed plans for a World Food Board to protect nations and people from hunger in the world market system. That market system does not distribute food on the basis of nutritional need. This is one of the most troubling and complex realities of the world hunger problem. During recent famines in Ethiopia, in another example of the workings of the marketplace, foreign food aid begins trucked to famine areas from ships at the docks passed food leaving the famine areas on other vehicles. Merchants were taking food from famine areas to parts of the country where there was no famine. World Hunger and poverty can be seen in many ways. But first lets establish a solid definition of poverty : Poverty is a state in which the ability of individuals or groups to use power to bring about good for themselves, their families, and their community is weakened or blocked. When someone lacks food, this is referred to as material poverty. This sort of poverty can hurt people in many ways, it can hurts people’s self esteem and it can also hurt their outlook on life. Lets say you come home from work to see your family, instead of seeing a family which is happy because it has a roof over its head you come home to see that your children don’t have enough food on the table to keep them properly nourished. This hurts familys and tears some of them apart. It is also just a very cruel punishment because after a while of being hungry, you start to starve to death and when you starve, the body just starts to eat itself up to find the nourishment it needs. It can also effect people’s outlook on life and on people in a major way. People who are denied food can start to hate life and everyone around them. There’s also two instincts in life that will always kick in when your hungry: The survival instinct which is to survive no matter what the situation is and the instinct to provide food for your family. I am not a father myself, but I talked to my own dad about this. My own father said that if I was ever starving that he would do anything it takes to make sure that I have the proper nourishment. Im not sure my father would go this far, but I know there are some fathers that would reach a point to where they would even kill for food. This feed the monster we call the “spiral of violence” and helps to encourage it grow. Because we have in the long run, poor people stealing and sometimes killing for no reason. They shouldn’t have to steal or kill for food, they should at least have enough food to eat to survive. In fact, there is enough food grown in the world to supply ever man with thirty-six thousand calories a day, this is enough to cause weight gain. In my opinion, I feel some governments want their people to be hungry. Babies are being born every second, the population is starting to get out of control, there are more and more people in the world, I think some governments are trying to use their control on food to control the population by starving their people. There are a few other solutions to World Hunger, for instance, one is Food Security. The opposite of being threatened by hunger is to have food security. The two basic elements of food security are, first, a regular food supply large enough to meet human nutritional needs and, second, access to a supply of food in sufficient quantity at all times to maintain a healthy, active life. The world hunger problem is the absence of food security for 10 percent to 20 percent of the world’s population. Th steady food supply could come from fellow rich countries.

Hunger affects Third World Nations in many ways also. A Third World Nation or Country is a developing country, for example: Ethiopia could be considered a Third World Country. Currently, around fifteen to twenty million people die each year of hunger-related causes, including diseases brought on by lowered resistance due to malnutrition. Over 40 percent of all deaths in poor countries occur among children under five years old. There are seven main reasons why poor countries can’t provide food for their people: 1) The demand for exports: Wealthy countries demand products like coffee, sugar, lumber, and grains from poor countries. So a poor country’s economy moves away from providing food and resources for its own people. 2) Government by the elite: Many of the world’s poorest and hungriest nations are controlled by governments consisting of the nations’ wealthiest members. Government policies tend to favor the interests of the wealthy rather than the poor. 3) Conditions on aid programs: Aid that is offered by wealthy countries to poor countries often comes with strings attached. For example, a wealthy country might give a poor country money, but require the poor country to use the money to build roads, bridges, and airports. This in no way helps the poor country provide food for its people. 4) Debt payments and conditions: Most poor countries are deeply into debt to banks. Paying interest on loans takes money from programs that could help eliminate hunger. 5) Discrimination: Ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination within poor countries also cause poverty. Religious and ethnic minorities are likely to be more impoverished then other groups, and with no money comes no food. 6) Arms sales: Military spending by poor countries is encouraged by rich countries that make and sell arms. Because of this, valuable money which could go to help by food is spent on weapons. The spiral of violence is also fueled by the availability of weapons, which increases repression and adds to poverty and hunger. 7) Abuse of land and other resources: The abuse of a poor country’s resources leads to environmental degradation. Damaged land cannot be effectively farmed for local food production. These are seven reasons which contribute to the hunger in some Third World Countries. So a lot of hunger is caused by the military, so even when countries aren’t at war, they can cause death just by being selfish. The United states dies offer help to some of these countries , but might wonder how come the us doesn’t give more help to these countries? Well, to ally themselves with the interests of the poor, groups such as U.S. AID would have to support those groups throughout the third world that are confronting the issue of power-the issue of control over the resources. To do so would pit these groups against the interests of the powerful dominating most governments in the world today. To do so would go against the “formidable lobbyists of multinational corporations”. To do so would be to risk supporting democratic economic alternatives abroad that might lead more Americans to question how just their own economic system has become. For these reasons, no U.S. government group is about to do so. This is where we conclude that agencies of the U.S. government are incapable of arriving at a correct answer of the root causes of hunger- an answer that puts control over resources in the central position. Currently, the United States is trying to remove some obstacles which help contribute to World Hunger, for instance they try to send as much aid as they can to hungry nations. But again, are we really sending as much aid as we could?

Where there is hunger, the path to a workable solution starts by asking what normally entitles people to a share of food in the “particular social context” in which they are living. Well I say they are automatically entitled to a share of food because they are humans that were given life to by god, and that is our guarantee to food. Hunger can also seen as a disease that is plaguing our society. The world currently spends $550 billion a year producing, buying, and selling military weapons. The world currently spends about $22 on military purposes for every dollar it spends on official development aid. One out of every four human beings has no access to safe drinking water. What the world spends in half a day on military purposes could finance the entire malaria eradication program of the World Health Organization. The rice of one military tank vehicle could provide improved storage facilities for 100,000 tons of rice. Everyday, the world produces two pounds of grain for every man, woman, and child on earth. That is enough to provide everyone 3,000 calories a day, well above the recommended daily minimum of 2,300 calories. What am I trying to prove with these facts? I am trying to prove that as human begins and since we are all god’s children, we should be worried about giving each other support so we can all survive. Instead we are worried about who will have the most tanks or guns. If we stopped spending so much money on military expansion, we could easily provide every man, woman, and child in the world with enough food to get fat! Hunger is plaguing our society, its a disease that kills many people every year, and the sad thing is that so many people in rich countries like the United States, Japan, and etc, will never know the truth about World Hunger. Everyday I can see America indirectly making the situation worse and worse. I flip on the television everyday and see commercials about the starving the children and they show little kids on laying on a bed starving to death. I find this very disrespectful to the people who are really starving, they shouldn’t be shown like animals on a tv screen, they should be given dignity. They shouldn’t be shown on tv at all, I am sure they are not proud of the way they look and probably wouldn’t want to be on tv. We should stop trying to have the biggest military force and start trying to live like Jesus would want us to and help our fellow brothers in Christ.

Due to many self-centered greedy people, we have fellow humans starving to death. This can’t keep going on because every time someone starves, we are not just hurting that person but we are also hurting ourselves. We all live in the world as one race with different sections. The sections being the different nationalities we have in the world. And whenever one division gets hurt, the whole gets weakened. We need to depend on each other to survive from day to day healthy. It is true the poverty is a main cause of world hunger but it isn’t the only cause. If the economy was serving the people and not the other way around then more people would have the money needed to buy food to live from day to day. And if greedy governments gave some of he people money or food they would have money to buy food. If the Military stopped using so much money to make machines that kill, there would be more money for people to buy food with. And if more people cared there would be a lot less starving people in this world. If this hunger doesn’t end, I can see a very pathetic world in our future.

Link: The Hunger Site