World hunger

Résumé du document

World hunger is a very general topic; we can ponder over the reasons of world hunger. Did we finally end up accepting it? What could the solutions be? How can we fight it? Why is it that the world is capable of feeding everyone but there are still people dying owing to poverty and lack of food? Indeed we are now in the 21st century, and people are still dying of hunger, lots of authors such as Sylvie Brunel, Amartya Sen, Jean Ziegler, Josué de Castro, have written about it and propose different causes and solutions as the reasons change and evolve. As Sylvie Brunel wrote in her book “Hunger in the world” nowadays famine never just comes out of the blue. When there is food penury it does not appear overnight, there are signs and they are well known: food reserves disappear, men leave and children start to shows signs of malnutrition. In the years to come, we need to highlight the priority of food access as the most important human right, and we need to impose it through international juridical structure, treaties and norms. In the next few pages we are going to see why if the world produces enough food to feed 12billion people (according to the FAO), there are still famines and world hunger persists?

The first main cause is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow or income to purchase enough food. Different regions in the world are facing problems related to food, for example, nearly half of hungry people are located in the South Asian continent. If we look at India, there is currently a booming growth, but a significant part of the population, is not part of it, especially people living in rural areas that do not have access to food and thus cannot feed their children. To illustrate this, there are figures which reveal that in India, out of 130 million children under the age of 5, half are affected by malnutrition, with a majority of girls, children from low caste and Dalit branded “untouchable” (UNICEF, 2009). We can wonder how many of them, in 2050, will still be alive? Amartya Sen, who received the Economic Nobel Prize in 1998 and who is originally from India wrote that there are “numerous factors that lead to famine, both economical and social such as falling wages, unemployment, rise in food prices and poverty of the system which distributes food”.

Extraits

[...] We need to insist on the eradication of world h (Sen, 1982)unger as a priority, like as been done with malaria, putting it right in the heart of international conversation. Bibliography Brunel, S. (2002). Famine et Politique. Brunel, S. (1999). La Faim Dans le Monde. Sen, A. [...]

[...] Indeed, in the past decades, hunger has been used as a weapon in countries at war. Most of the famines that occur nowadays are not linked to drought or natural disaster but to political problems, for example armed groups can prevent aid from entering the country, and pretend famine doesn't exist (Somalia recently). So hunger has become a strong political force for those armed groups, and it gives them strength (just like in Somalia with the armed group Al Shabab). [...]

[...] What could the solutions be? How can we fight it? Why the world is capable of feeding everyone but there are still people dying because of poverty and lack of food? Indeed we are now in the XXI century, and people are still dying of hunger, lots of authors such as Sylvie Brunel, Amartya Sen, Jean Ziegler, Josué de Castro wrote about it and propose different causes and solutions as the reasons are changing and evolving. As Sylvie Brunel wrote in her book “hunger in the world” nowadays famine never just comes out of the blue. [...]

[...] So politicians, at the international level, need to take step to fight world hunger which is definitely not acceptable in the XXI century. We need to eradicate it, and we must not accept that 10 million people die of hunger every year (according to the FAO) if it is avoidable. Those treaties and norms should include the interdiction of speculation on commodities, the interdiction of agricultural dumping and the interdiction of crop destruction by wild cards agrofuel. In a report of The World Bank, it is estimated that just 1 dollar per person per year would greatly improve the lives of more than four billion people so this amount could play a major role in keeping families above the poverty line. [...]

[...] That shows us well that poverty has highly increased in France in the past few years. Even closer to us, in Grenoble, on the campus, with the distribution of food packages (for only 1 euro), for students who cannot afford to buy food. Those two examples show us that problems of food access have been accentuated by the crisis of 2008. In the United States, food insecurity disproportionately affects certain minority groups, overall blacks and Hispanics are 2.5 times more likely to face food insecurity than whites. [...]