Reflecting on Hunger At Home And Abroad

While travelling last week, I picked up a book for some airplane reading titled Ending Hunger Now, a book co-written by George McGovern, Bob Dole and Donald Messer.  McGovern and Dole, while on opposite sides of the political aisle in many different ways have worked together for years to promote programs to illeviate the scourge of chronic hunger domestically and internationally.

In the book, Dole and McGovern discuss the Millenium Development Goal of cutting world hunger in half by the year 2015.  They make the case that the problems of hunger are not those limited by food production or capacity - the problems are political in nature.  (As we in Iowa can see by driving past the mountains of corn piled next to elevators all over the state.)

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported earlier this month that progress has been stalled. 

22 November 2005, Rome – Hunger and malnutrition arekilling nearly six million children each year – a figure that roughly equals the entire pre-school population of a large country such as Japan, FAO said in a new edition of its annual hunger report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, published today.

Many of these children die from a handful of treatable infectious diseases including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles. They would survive if their bodies and immune systems had not been weakened by hunger and malnutrition.

In addition, the USDA released a report that states domestic hunger is on the rise.
Eighty-eight percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2004, meaning that they had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households were food insecure at least some time during that year. The prevalence of food insecurity rose from 11.2 percent of households in 2003 to 11.9 percent in 2004 and the prevalence of food insecurity with hunger rose from 3.5 percent to 3.9 percent.

Fighting hunger is one of those issues that is not "Republican", "Democrat", or even "American" - it is a Human issue.

Please take time this Thanksgiving week to do a little bit to help fight hunger at home and abroad through any one of many charities.

Bread For The World is an organization that works to keep the focus on  fighting chronic hunger through political activism, relief and research.  They have also joined with other charities to create the One Campaign to fight global hunger and poverty.