Hunger: Born With a Death Sentence?

Walking the world to feed hungry children

Even though there is enough food to feed every human being in the world, one child dies every five seconds from hunger or hunger-related causes. This is not confined to developing or underdeveloped countries. From the USA to Sudan, from Russia to Peru, hunger knows no boundaries.

According to FAO, an estimated 17 million babies born every year are underweight, inheriting hunger from their mothers, who are themselves undernourished. If they live long enough, their children will be hungry too.

While most people are aware of the need for food when it is a visible incident on our TV screen like wars, massive natural disasters or famines, the majority of the hungry die because of an invisible famine, suffering from chronic hunger and malnourishment that affects their immune systems. Most of us do not realize that there are related health costs of hunger and food insecurity like mental retardation, anemia, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, diarrhea, etc. which again lead to either lifelong disabilities or slow death.

In September 2000, 147 heads of state and government, and 189 nations in total committed themselves in the United Nations Millennium Declaration to make the right to development a reality for everyone and to free the entire human race from want. They set up the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the first one reads thus: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

This would be impossible to achieve if we go on as before and would have a direct impact on the other MDGs like universal primary education, gender and reproductive health, combating HIV/AIDS, etc.

What Does This Mean?

In 1999, which was a financially good year for the US, 31 million Americans were food insecure, meaning they were either hungry or unsure of where their next meal would come from. Of these, 12 million were children. If this is the situation in the USA, the lone superpower of the world, can you imagine the condition in other countries?

The SOFI report says, “While poverty is undoubtedly a cause of hunger, hunger can also be a cause of poverty. Hunger often deprives impoverished people of the one valuable resource they can call their own: the strength and skill to work productively.”

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel, hungry people cannot work their way out of poverty. He estimates that 20 percent of the population in England and France was effectively excluded from the labor force around 1790 because they were too weak and hungry to work. Improved nutrition, he calculates, accounted for about half of the economic growth in Britain and France between 1790 and 1880. Since many developing countries are as poor as Britain and France were in 1790, his analysis suggests reducing hunger could have a similar impact in developing countries today.

So countries need to achieve food security or be helped to such a state if we are to avoid the invisible mass murder each year because of unawareness and inaction.

What Is Food Security?

Food security means access to safe, sufficient and nutritious food

The Rome Declaration of the World Food Summit in 1996 defined food security as , “When all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to safe, sufficient and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

Agriculture is central to the issues of food security and poverty. It is the main source of employment and income in most developing countries. Growth and development of agriculture is essential for achieving food security at the household, local, regional and national levels in any country. For example in India, the agriculture sector accounts for over 30% of the GDP and 60% of employment. Therefore any adverse development that affects this sector, affects the whole country's food security. This is true for most developing nations. After decades, some countries can talk of food surplus and hence food security but all will be lost if they face a water crisis. Simply put, a good harvest means a good year for all people of a country. Food security is entirely dependent on water security. With increasing urbanization and population, a long term plan for sustainable development of water resources with an emphasis on efficient use and biodiversity in agriculture is essential if we wish to retain our egalitarian goals of food security for all and thereby eradicate hunger and its related illnesses and deaths.

The Way Forward—Biodiversity

To ensure food security, biodiversity and a good food distribution system is indispensable. Biological diversity is fundamental to agriculture and food production. As we live in different climatic conditions, humans depend on the variety of food, shelter, and goods for their livelihood. Some people are going back to traditional agricultural practices like the people of India and China. This has resulted in the improvement of the food situation in these two countries. There is less number of hungry people in both countries though they do have a long way to go because of their population size. A good example of going back to basics would be the villagers of southern Andhra Pradesh, one of the southern states of India, which 5 years ago made headlines for its landless laborers, loan sharks, and farmer suicides. They were growing Bt Cotton supplied by Mahyco-Monsanto and when drought hit them, they not only lost their investment but had to sell off their land to loan sharks. Worse still, since Monsanto supplied the seeds, the farmers didn't have seed security and also lost their right to control (save and use) the seed under intellectual property law.

Now most of them have stopped growing cash crops like rice and Bt cotton and have started growing their traditional food of millet, pulses and other food grains which are not only more nutritious but also consume less water and can be grown the whole year round instead of seasonal crops like rice or wheat. These farmers have also rediscovered traditional practices of community seed banks, ecological agriculture and biodiversity farming, especially in fallow lands. The result is extremely encouraging. Today, the landless laborers of this region own land, have managed to eradicate hunger, loan sharks, and there are no farmer suicides. They hold a biodiversity festival each year, where they are spreading the word to other villages. And each year there is an increasing number of villages returning to older practices of times when people grew food to satisfy their own hunger and that of the region rather than growing unfamiliar crops for foreign markets that don't suit their climate and food habits.

The Beginning to a Better Life

This is just a start. The people of the developing and underdeveloped world need to reclaim their ancient and traditional practices of crop and seed production in agriculture which were more productive, helped increase soil fertility, and created food secure communities that were environmentally friendly before food globalization became fashionable.

If we fail now to fight against hunger and go on without reviewing our current practices, everything else will be affected. For hunger breeds poverty and this means none of the other Millennium Development Goals, including primary education, reproductive health, and eradicating domestic violence can be worked on, let alone be achieved. This is because the hungry are already dying in large numbers and it would be impossible to persuade a child to go to school on an empty stomach unless governments of those countries can provide them with mid-day meals in schools as they do in southern India. Though this has helped reduce the number of child laborers, it is still not a perfect solution, as some children drop out once they become a little older so they can earn incomes for their families. An empty belly also increases crime rates, and creates a more intolerant society which is indifferent to death, destruction and justice. Try telling a hungry American why the US shouldn't have invaded Iraq or a hungry Rwandan why the Tutsis shouldn't be murdered. Hungry people could care less about politics or the environment.

Most importantly, you can't expect a predominantly hungry world to care about the future of the human race when they are not sure where their next meal is coming from. So it is up to us, the food secure people of the world, to fight against hunger on a sustained basis to save our fellow humans from the mass murder each year, especially of children who are the future of the human race.

To find out where the ‘walk' in your country will take place, visit http://www.fighthunger.org

Deepa Kandaswamy is an award winning writer, political analyst and engineer based in India. Her articles have been published in six continents and some of her writing credits include PC Plus (UK), Middle East Policy (US), Christian Science Monitor, Ms., Herizons (Canada), Khaleej Times (UAE), Film Ink (Australia), The Hindu (India), and Gurlz (India). She can be contacted by e-mailing to kdeepa@excite.com.