Hungry for Solutions

As Hunger Awareness Week draws to a close, let us not forget that global hunger itself has increased just since the week began. It is so easy for those of us with plenty to eat to keep hunger abstract, one of those discomforting truths that are best kept distant. It happens to other people. People we don’t know. People very far away.

Yet the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reports that an estimated 925 million people are suffering from hunger worldwide, and one of the three main causes of this hunger is a neglect of agriculture relevant to people in the developing countries. By shifting from multi-crop subsistence agriculture to mono-crop export production, entire societies have gone from well fed to hungry in a single generation. All those delicious foods like bananas, pineapples, sugar, and coffee have come at a hefty price to those who now work for paltry wages to grow foods for export on what was once communal land for subsistence crops. And since the 1980’s, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies have included requiring developing countries to devalue their currency, leading to staggering inflation and high food prices, at the same time restricting any government subsidies to help small farmers whose cash value for their crops falls when corporate agriculture competes.

The causes of hunger are rarely a shortage of food, but unequal distribution of the resources necessary to feed people – including land, agricultural inputs, labor, and income. The result of our staggering economic growth in some parts of the world has been the development of medical technologies that save lives, industrial technologies that transport, store and distribute food, and communications technologies that have provided instantaneous access to information and education. Yet one in seven people in the world lacks the nutrition necessary to live a healthy life according to the FAO, a figure that has risen by nearly a third since 1995.

When someone dies of hunger in a world abundant with food, there is something terribly wrong and out of whack. Yet every year 15 million children die of hunger, and in the time it’s taken you to read this article, an estimated 30 children have died from hunger. We wiped out small pox with the vision of a few people, and the hard work of many. We brought the World Wide Web to the world, have imagined ways to get cell phones, lap tops and Charlie Sheen to the furthest pockets of the world. We have figured out a way to tax every person on the planet. If we can stretch our imaginations in these ways, surely we can stretch them to feed the planet.

What ideas do you have for feeding the hungry? How might we market the end of hunger across the globe?