The Problem of World Hunger - Essay Example

Running Head World Hunger World Hunger Inserts His/Her Inserts Grade Inserts 12 March 2009 At the beginning of the 21st century, hunger is still one of the main problems affected global communities. Far away from people and spread over more than three continents is a world crowded with underfed, ill-fed, and impoverished people who comprise most of the human race. Researchers do not see and hardly understand that strange and distant world, but unless researchers come to terms with it, researchers will remain incapable of putting the pieces of the human puzzle together. The five participants in the game of Reality, by operating from a vantage point that did not take this world of misery into account, put their weight inadvertently on the side of a broken future. For the most part, however, the hungry of the world are too much a part of the landscape to alarm travelers (Vernon, 2007). They do not beg in the streets and they are not starving to death. But because their bodies and minds have grown accustomed to lack of nourishment since infancy, they are weakened, sometimes mentally retarded, prematurely aged, vulnerable to disease, with opportunities in life--along with life itself--cut short. To work, if possible, and to keep themselves and their families alive consumes all the energy the poorest of the world can muster. Canada, a developed and economically stable country, also suffers from the problem of hunger and lack of food experienced by low social classes and underclass. The diagram (see appendix 1) shows that 6,3% of Canadians experience hunger regularly. Some categories of people experience hunger at he end of month (19,9% and 8.7&). Some categories of people experience hunger from time to time as a result of job loss and other expenses (such as healthcare or insurance needs) – 65% of all people who hunger in Canada. Researchers (Heimann, 2004) admit that hunger is hidden Canada, and consequently much closer to the doorsteps than researchers are apt to think. Coming from the rural areas to a crowded, neglected urban ghetto, they suddenly encountered a host of living problems that they were not equipped to handle, and these have further diluted their ability to assemble an adequate diet (Vernon, 2007). The Human Resources Development Canada estimates that one-third to one-half of the worlds people suffer from nutritional deprivation. In the low-income countries alone, one-half to two-thirds fall into that category by various estimates. Norman E. Borlaug, who has played a key role in expanding world food production, estimates that half of the worlds population is undernourished and two-thirds is malnourished (cited Russell, 2006). It is fair to conclude that in poor countries as a whole, the poor comprise a hungry majority. Communities call nutritionally deprived people "hungry," even though the term is far from precise and may or may not include the feeling of hunger. Some are under nourished--incapable of getting enough calories each day to provide their bodies with fuel for minimal demands. These calorie-deficient persons number about a half billion, and the total would rise substantially if it were figured on the basis of peoples potential (rather than minimal) functioning capacity. Others--perhaps half the worlds population--are mal nourished (Vernon, 2007). They get their calories, but the quality is seriously defective. These people are primarily protein-deficient. A protein gap, therefore, causes most of the hunger, and unfortunately the gap is widening. The persistence of poverty above all frustrates otherwise achievable means of getting people above the hunger line. Some of povertys stubbornness stems from the population explosion, for if within a few decades researchers had the population problem basically in hand, and made peace with the environment, researchers could almost certainly develop the necessary food-producing technology to feed the world. But there are two catches to that possibility (see appendix 2,3,4). According to statistical results, “1.6% of Canadian families with children under age 12 reported experiencing hunger in 1996” (Hunger in Canada. 2002). Asia contains about one-quarter of the worlds tilled land. Asians consume about one-quarter of the worlds food. Yet more than half of the world lives in Asia. It requires seven Asian farmers to produce enough to supply their own families plus three nonfarm families, and that on a badly deficient level. With the prospect of hundreds of millions of additional Asians soon living on farms, and acreage suitable for new cultivation closing out, existing farmland has to become more productive and labor-intensive. In addition, if subsistence-level farmers cannot take part in improved methods, especially those connected with high-yield cereals, they will be driven off the land in even greater hordes and become part of unimaginable human cesspools in the cities. In that case higher production might increase the number of hungry people (Vernon, 2007). The main causes of the hunger is population growth and lack of food. Appalling and contradictory as hunger is in this productive land, it is dwarfed next to the enormity of world hunger. In Canada the number of hungry people is gradually receding, while on the earth as a whole hunger expands by sheer force of the rate at which the worlds population is multiplying (Swain, 2007). Consequently, despite some impressive gains in the production of food, hunger continues to increase simply because each day brings nearly 200,000 more people to feed. The populations will soon be adding mouths to the human race at the rate of one billion a decade, more than three quarters of them to the poor nations. These nations grow increasingly restless as they see the gap between themselves and the rich nations grow wider and wider. Word has filtered from cities to the most backward rural areas that in the United States and elsewhere, people eat every day until they are full, see physicians when they are sick, and send their children to school. The eyes of the poor have been opened to their own misery, and now they are determined to eat, dress, and dwell in dignity. This is the so-called "revolution of rising expectations," and it may be the most potent force in the world today. Because rising expectations are often frustrated, they contain seeds of violence. Modernizing efforts in a backward country are no automatic cure either. They may for decades simply tear people from the land and traditions of their fathers, and force them into urban shanties without the work or the wages that put improvement within reach. Before the end of the century the rich countries will be surrounded by hundreds of millions of people dying from hunger. People will sit in front of television sets and watch them starve to death before the eyes. People are already growing callous about human life, Snow maintains, as a reaction to the population boom. While researchers of the rich nations see the worlds poor engulfing people in escalating numbers, People shut ourselves off from them. Instead of reaching out researchers are huddling together, turning inward to protect what researchers have, behaving as though researchers were in a state of siege. Perhaps, people will use technology to fight off the hungry nations (Heimann, 2004, see appendix 5). Related to Canada, this world view does not accept surroundings of family, neighborhood, or nation as the boundaries of concern, to which the rest of the world is appended. Rather, it sees this entire planet as the one common environment for all humanity. It looks at the international community as the setting in which all smaller units of the human race must find a harmonious place. As a result it is necessary for people to grow beyond childhood attachments, and as people once learned that the little circle of people and places researchers knew was part of a great nation to which people belonged, now researchers must learn that the nation is part of a single, interrelated body of people stretching out and connected to each other around the globe (Swain, 2007). This is habitat, and people will make it livable together or people will go down in ruins together. Not only is this world view totally compatible with love for country, but any lesser view does disservice to a country. This has to be stressed, for as soon as you speak of a sympathy toward the international community which transcends in some important respects the immediate, perceived self-interests of a nation, a kind of knee-jerk patriotism often appears. Rooted in the emotional needs of insecure people, it provides a cause to rally around, but history has shown time and again that instead of true patriotism, it is a mindless, destructive force (Heimann, 2004). The parent who sides with his child no matter how wrong the child may be does not manifest love; on the contrary he uses the child as a tool to shore up his own ego at a vulnerable point, and such a parent inflicts great damage. This view of the world urgently needs more adherents, among rank-and-file citizens, because it is in harmony with the physical and moral facts of life, and for that reason it is a vantage point which will enable people to deal sensibly with a variety of problems that confound people. Consider the domestic front. A key factor is abdication of leadership at the highest level: presidents without a vision of the worlds poor, and senators and congressmen who have their sights fixed on the next election (Heimann, 2004). The programs and methods aimed to eliminate hunger involve special programs for low class citizens and support of families with children. In Canada the reason for government failure to respond is ignorance. Although events pour in upon people from every continent and the news media are present, alive and in color, in living rooms, people tend to pick their news in bits and pieces, smorgasbord style, so that a comprehensive picture is not apt to emerge. Besides, the media fail to cover many issues that are vital to the poor nations. Related to ignorance is remoteness. Television helps people to see hungry people, but immediate replay of dislocated refugees, napalmed children, or starving Pakistanis also has an impersonal quality to it; it is not really happening, or it is happening far away to strange people do not know and whose lives do not touch our own. Bracketing these snatches of news are messages telling people to spend money on a host of attractions--one offers a choice of eight different meat combinations for my dog--so the total effect, far from orienting thinking and behavior around a concern for these desperate people, may brainwash people against such a response (Lappe, 1998). For many Canadians, a feeling of helplessness also lingers with many of people. Hunger and the problems surrounding it appear so enormous, so overwhelming that researchers are apt to wring hands and despair of doing anything at all. Undisguised apathy, too, accounts for diminishing response. Selfish is an enduring part of human nature, and in the end people may simply believe what they want to believe about the world, and do what they prefer to do. It may be possible to shock a few complacent souls into a state of good sense by appealing to their long-range self-interest, or to hope for mental or moral conversion, but the grip of apathy is hard to break. Growing numbers of people have an uneasy suspicion that the patchwork of painless reforms and improvements usually proposed by candidates for public office does not come to grips with the social crisis here at home, much less in the world (Lappe, 1998). A feeling of helplessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but simple, concrete actions can exert an important influence toward feeding the hungry and establishing a better, more peaceful world. These actions include the work of private organizations; but they also, and most urgently, require people to take part in political affairs so that national priorities reflect the best and not the worst in people (Heimann, 2004; McGovern et al 2006). In sum, the technology of food production can open and expand frontiers, but it cannot work magic. Writers tend to dramatize new methods and give the impression that a cornucopia for everybody is just around the corner. That misleads. Not many more deserts are likely to bloom in the next decades, because usable water is limited--witness the fight of states over rights to existing supplies. Some day the oceans may yield desalted water for transport to the deserts, but the difficulties and cost now are prohibitive. Extending irrigation will continue to be important for increasing food production, but the places suited for this are limited. Environmental backlash is a major restraint on irrigation schemes in many regions. Nonconventional high-protein foods are certain to become increasingly important, but first much research has to be done, and manufacturing and marketing methods developed. The idea that poverty is the result of moral failure is sufficiently widespread that over the years outrageous contradictions have developed. References Heimann, C. (2004). Hunger in Canada: Perception of the Problem. http://www.cafb-` acba.ca/documents/Totum_report_2004.pdf. Hunger in Canada. (2009). Retrieved from www.worldsocialism.org/canada/imagine.200210.oct.pdf Lappe, F. M. (1998). World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Grove Press; 2 Sub edition. McGovern, G. Dole, B., Messer, D.F. (2006). Ending Hunger Now. Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Russell, S.A. (2006). Hunger: An Unnatural History. Basic Books. Swain, B. K. (2007). World Hunger. iUniverse, Inc. Vernon, J. (2007). Hunger: A Modern History. Belknap Press. Appendix 1. Diagram . 2. Child Hunger in Canada 3. Global Hunger Index 4. Global Hunger Changes 5. A Photo of Nigerian family suffered from hunger Read More