Food for thought this Christmas

[Gelion]

Politics aside what do you think about this?

Food for thought this Christmas - 12/10/2004 10:01

The number of starving in the world has increased by nearly 20 million since the mid 1990s

While hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on weapons, war, killing and destruction and countless more billions are spent on Christmas, the number of people starving in the world is increasing, instead of decreasing.

However boring those people are who spread gloom and doom stories at Christmas time trying to make the rest of us feel guilty as we tuck into our stuffed turkeys and push yet another glass of wine into our already bloated bellies, the latest report from the FAO deserves mention this Christmas.

?The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2004¦ is the name of the report released yesterday, December 8th, by the UNO's Food and Agriculture Organization. To ignore this report is a sin.

While certain nations spend billions, not tens of billions but hundreds of billions of dollars on the destruction of the State of Iraq (and tens of thousands of its citizens, including innocent women and children), the number of starving in the world has increased by nearly 20 million since the mid 1990s, according to the report.

Furthermore, between 2000 and 2002, the number of starving rose to 852 million people, nearly one billion. At the beginning of the third millennium, what are we doing?

At this rate, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which intended to halve the number of starving by 2015, will never be reached and what a pitiful comment on humankind that some of us spend so much on illegal wars, slaughtering children with cluster bombs in a quixotic quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction which continue to go AWOL, while at the same time more and more people find themselves without enough money to put a meal on the table.

This shameful comment on the development of humankind is compounded by the statement from the General Director of the FAO, Hartwig de Haen, who declared that ?Enough is known about how to end hunger and now is the time to capture the momentum towards that goal,¦ adding that it is a question of ?political will and prioritization.¦

So, we see very clearly the political will and the list of priorities drawn up by the clique of sycophants who backed George Bush's act of butchery in Iraq. First, crawl around the legs of the elitist regime in Washington, hoping for contracts to be doled out, second try to stimulate the arms industry, selling more and more equipment to slaughter fellow human beings and to hell with the rest of humankind.

History always judges in hindsight and en masse and it will be interesting to see how the history book will describe mankind at the beginning of the Third Millennium, when we will be seen as collectively spending more on killing each other and destroying our cities than defending and saving members of our own species in need.

In the forefront of the fight to set things right is Brazil's President Lula da Silva, who together with the UNO, Chile, France and Spain has formed the Quintet against Hunger, a movement which stimulates partnerships such as self-financing farming schools, which teach farmers how to make the most of their local conditions.

The United Kingdom has also launched an idea to provide an international fund, based on the sale of government bonds, to provide 50 billion USD per year to address the problems of the world's poorest nations by 2015. Yes, we should feel guilty this year as we carve our stuffed turkeys and stuff them down our gullets because at the beginning of the Third Millennium, mankind was supposed to have risen to a higher and nobler state of development.

We all know who we have to blame for this but the history book will blame all of us, not only Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Rice et alia. It is time mankind said a collective NO! to war and destruction of families and homes and YES! to developing the countries which have been held down for so long, by using subsidies and tariffs, while at the same time the ?developed¦ world claims that it practises a policy of free trade.

The fact that hunger and famine is rising, reaching almost a billion, at the beginning of the century, is a telling comment on the deplorable political leadership demonstrated by those who deride the UNO as a League of Nations and then proceed with a shocking act of mass murder, spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the process.

Source: http://english.pravda.ru/printed.html?news_id=14706

 

[Hitro]

How can you put politics aside when it comes to that? Unless of course someone thinks starvation is great, or something like that...

 

[SeleucusNicator]

I think its very odd to post a political article and then ask that we reply with "politics aside".

 

[GEChallenger]

Ehm... the writer kind of killed any worthwile message he might have had with the blind ranting about the current US administration...

Although, since you said to ignore politics I'll comment on starvationg (although most of the article was politics)...

World hunger can never be solved, just alleviated. Dumping money on it won't help. Saying that the billions of dollars spent on christmas gifts and warfare could be better spent elsewhere is incredibly naive.

Well... I could go on for awhile. Personally I don't care too much; it's a damn shame, but realistically there's little that can be done. I'm getting a little tired of hearing self-righteous rants like these, though it doesn't lessen my enjoyment of Christmas.

 

[mrtn]

The number of starving in the world has increased by nearly 20 million since the mid 1990s

How much has world population risen during that time?

 

[cgannon64]

I think its very odd to post a political article and then ask that we reply with "politics aside".

It means he doesn't want us to disagree with him.

 

[Azadre]

It means he doesn't want us to disagree with him.

Or we could take off our political hats and put on our pundit hats and figure out what we can do.

 

[Shadylookin]

perhaps jesus and the various pagan gods born on December 25 will it thus? Either way thinking that slapping billions of freshly pressed USD on the situation is going to help it is silly. You can give a man a box of condoms but you can't make him use them, when a population grows faster than it's infrastructure can take you get problems. And as much as I don't care for Bush blaming one man from Texas on a problem that spans all of human history is undermining your objectivity.

 

[cgannon64]

What can we do? Get rid of the horrible, horrible leadership. There is no reason anyone in the world starves unless a dictator is taking the food from their hands.

 

[Azadre]

What can we do? Get rid of the horrible, horrible leadership. There is no reason anyone in the world starves unless a dictator is taking the food from their hands.

Or we can flood their markets with surplus.

 

[GEChallenger]

Or we can flood their markets with surplus.

Now there's a fantastic idea.

 

[amadeus]

The corrupt dictators would intercept the food and then sell it to other countries. That's what the Somali warlords did.

 

[cgannon64]

Yep. People forget that was the exact reason we went into Somalia.

 

[luiz]

Ah, the article mentions Lula's great crusade against hunger... too bad it does not mention that his internal program to fight hunger(Fome Zero - Hunger Zero) was a gigantic failure and is today a national joke. It became a benchmark of public incompetence(Lula's party was defeated in the regional elections of the city that was supposed to be the symbol of Fome Zero...). He doesn't even mentions it anymore.

The article whines alot about how the West spends money on all sorts of crap(and I agree in that point) and does almost nothing to fight world hunger. But the truth is no ammount of money can fight this disease alone - not while the regimes in charge of the poor nations are as corrupt, beligerant and autocratic as they are now. If we look at the "hunger map", we will notice that the overwhelming majority of the people in that situation lives in corrupt dictatorships. What good would come out of giving those dictators lots of cash?

Something that would really help, though, would be to get rid of agricultural barriers. This could lift many people out of poverty, and while there is no guarantee that it would help the people who live in dictatorships, at least it would help the poor people who live in more or less democratic nations - and Africa does have a few of them.

 

[HighlandWarrior]

How much has world population risen during that time?

6,379,157,361 (July 2004 est.) according to cia factbook

in 1995 it was 5,600,000,000. according to ...
http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/environment/popula.html

difference of 779157361 people or 0.78 billion.

20,000,000/780,000,000 = 0.0256410256410256410256410256410256

so 2.56% of all people born since 1995 are starving.

I say we kill all the dictators starving their own people! like the great man in N.Korea, and dispose of robert mugabe and his band of morons letting all the farms just sit there being unproductive.

 

[BasketCase]

The corrupt dictators would intercept the food and then sell it to other countries. That's what the Somali warlords did.

This is what Saddam did also. He got rich off the Oil For Food program while his own people went hungry.

Neither oil-for-food nor Somalia are isolated incidents, either. Starvation is a very common weapon of war. If you control a person's food supply, you control the person. If they rebel against you--then four or five weeks later the rebellion stops.

There's plenty of food in the world. The problem is getting the surplus to where it's needed, and one of the main reasons humanitarian organizations can't get the food to where it's needed is because they'll get shot if they try.

In these cases, the only way to prevent starvation is to go to war. But, then, we're not permitted to do that any more, are we? Stability is more important than feeding the hungry.

War or starvation? Pick one. You will get one or the other no matter how you writhe and struggle and scream.

Choose.

 

[amadeus]

Mengistu did the same thing. He traded the food aid for arms.

 

[JohnRM]

People starve for one or more of the following reasons.

(1) They live in the desert where food will not grow.
(2) They live under a regime that prevents the right measures from being implemented in order to provide enough food for the population.
(3) They have too many children and cannot feed all of them.

Move to a democratic country, where the food is, and stop having so many children.

 

[BasketCase]

Politics aside:

The "State of the World" address described in the original post is not a condemnation of the human spirit by any means.

Wealth does NOT create responsibility. Look at your own home, for example. Yes, you. The person reading this post. What kind of house do you live in? Big one, small one, apartment? No matter. Whatever the size of your home, you could take in at least a few homeless people and put a roof over their heads. But you choose not to. Does that make you a bad person?

Or maybe you could give up your home entirely and live in a tent, and help even more homeless people.

For that matter, what about the resources being put into maintaining this board??? Instead of buying PC's and servers and generating electricity to power this monstrosity, we could be building low-cost housing!

See?

No matter how much effort we put into something, there's always something we could have done better.

Wealth does not create responsibility. And that Red Robin cheeseburger I ate this evening is sitting very comfortably in my stomach.

 

[Gelion]

It means he doesn't want us to disagree with him.

No I meant that you do not bash countries like it was done in the article, but focus on the problem. Like many of you did. Now carry on