Affection for Starving?

According to the World Hunger Organization, “Hunger” is a term which has three meanings (Oxford English Dictionary 1971)

• the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food
• the want or scarcity of food in a country
• a strong desire or craving .

“No one really knows how many people are malnourished. The statistic most frequently cited is that of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which measures 'undernutrition'. The most recent estimate (2006) of the FAO says that 854 million people worldwide are undernourished. This is 12.6 percent of the estimated world population of 6.6 billion. Most of the undernourished--820 million--are in developing countries.” The World Food Programme projects that “Because of the global economic slowdown and rising food prices, FAO projects 100 million more people will suffer from poverty and chronic hunger by the end of 2009 - an 11% increase from 2008.” Add up the numbers, and you are heading towards the terrifying count of one billion human beings who are not receiving enough food daily to sustain life.

It’s important to draw a distinction between hunger and starvation or famine. When famine strikes and huge numbers of people are threatened with imminent starvation, the world can be quick to respond with airlifts of food and medicine. Famines come and go, often the result of severe weather or even more severe politics, but chronic persistent hunger is unrelenting. Hunger occurs, when individuals don’t get sufficient nourishment on a daily basis. It’s usually the result of extreme poverty, and in adults, it means that the body doesn’t receive enough calories to maintain its own health. As a result, it slowly withers and dies. In children, the effects are far more horrible. Young minds and bodies that don’t receive enough nourishment to maintain health certainly can’t develop. Growth rates slow to a crawl, and minds never receive enough energy to bloom. A friend related to me a story of his work with impoverished children in Brazil. He tried to organize the kids in a small village to put on a play for their parents. Sadly, these young minds had never received the sustenance needed to develop. As a result, none of them had the capacity to remember enough dialog to be able to perform a simple skit.

The world responded to the obvious need to solve these horrific global defects. As summarized by Results.org: “In 2000, world leaders committed to a set of goals that would dramatically reduce extreme poverty by 2015. Called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they set targets for reducing hunger, disease, and poverty while promoting gender equality, health, education, and environmental sustainability. The MDGs provide a positive framework for creating a healthier, more prosperous world.” We’ll see how they (we) are doing in a moment.

Think about how you feel when you’ve had a tough day and you are “starving.” Okay, your belly isn’t swollen, your eyes aren’t gaunt, but it feels really bad. Nothing that a slab of comfort food can’t fix in a second. Want a dirt pie (literally) used in Haiti to fill empty stomachs? Didn’t think so. According to the FAO (2008 report), 8 million people die every year from lack of food or nutrition; that’s 24,000 a day, 16,000 of whom are children. Malnutrition claims one child every five seconds! And we’re worrying about the medical costs attributable to obesity that might make the healthcare plans posited in Washington become unaffordable, heart attacks, strokes and diabetes, directly linked to too much food.

Okay, the U.S. has its “hunger” problems as well. According to Bread.org, “In the United States, 11.7 million children live in households where people have to skip meals or eat less to make ends meet. That means one in ten households in the U.S. are living with hunger or are at risk of hunger.” But epidemic hunger in the U.S. is hardly the plague that governs so many in the developing world. And as financial pressures mount, the world seems to be failing to meet its own goals in defeating the severest forms of poverty and hunger that kill.

As we, as a nation, commit to spend $65 billion to battle in Afghanistan each year, the bad economy is whittling away at international programs (which targeted 2015 as the due date) designed to fight the deadly poverty that imposes malnutrition on these masses. According to the United Nations, “More than halfway to the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals … major advances in the fight against poverty and hunger have begun to slow or even reverse as a result of the global economic and food crises, a progress report by the United Nations has found. The assessment, launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Geneva, warns that, despite many successes, overall progress has been too slow for most of the targets to be met by 2015.”

It’s always a question of priorities, and strange people in distant lands, the photographs of children with flies hovering around their gaunt and tired eyes, their hands outstretched for food… living without hope or a future (and they did not ask to get born!)… are too easy to ignore. What are your priorities? Were you concerned with the possibility of a single little boy, 6-year-old Falcon Heene, lost in a drifting helium balloon dying in Colorado as his parents prayed for his return? Fortunately, he was found safe in his attic. He was missing for two hours, time for 1,440 children around the world to suffer completely preventable, and usually painful deaths. I suspect most of us didn’t think about that.

I’m Peter Dekom, and with a little help from Drew Gross, I approve this message.