By Majorie A. Stair, Bureau Chief
"Poor people living in shacks, shacks, shacks!
Rich people having heart attacks!"
- Lasana Bandele
THE GENERAL Elections, held on October 16, World Food Day overshadowed any activities, usually hosted by the local FAO office, RADA and the Ministry of Agriculture to remind us of the plight of the hungry of the world.
World Food Day, October 16 is the day used by the UNDP/FAO, each year, to highlight hunger in the world. When people must live with hunger and fear starvation".
This is the simple statement on the cover of the 2002 FAO Annual report, 'The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2002", released on World Food Day, 2002 October 16.
FAO Director General, Dr. Jacques Diouf, emphasises the fact that we do not have the excuse of either the insufficient production of food or the capability to produce enough food to meet the needs of the several billion people in the world to explain the state of food insecurity in the world in the Year 2002.
The FAO Director General states that progress in reducing world hunger has virtually come to a halt. As a result of hunger, millions of people, including 6 million children under the age of five, die each year. The distribution of the hungry is as follows:
Of the 840 million undernourished people in the world, between 1998 and 2000, 799 million or 95 per cent here in developing countries; 30 million or 4 per cent in transition countries and 11 million or 1 per cent in industrialised countries. Between 1990 - 1992 and 1998 - 2000, the number of undernourished people decreased by a mere 2.5 million per year and in most regions the number of undernourished may be actually growing. Dr Diouf says:
"The price we pay for this lack of progress (in reducing hunger) is heavy. The hungry themselves pay most immediately and most painfully. But the costs are also crippling for their communities, their countries and the global village that we all inhabit and share. To reach the goal of the World Food Summit, the number of hungry people needs to be reduced by 24 million each year from now until 2015."
The UNDP/FAO estimates that halving the number of undernourished by 2015 would yield a value of more than US$120 billion per year by simply allowing people to live longer, healthier lives. The report raises one of my real concerns. It is that whereas we readily accept that poverty is undoubtedly a cause of hunger, we tend to ignore the stark fact that hunger can also be the cause of poverty.
Hunger is present in Jamaica, not manifested as the grotesque pictures of hunger and starvation painted by the skin stretched over the bones of the emaciated and starving in Africa and Asia; the hollow sunken eyes, and flat empty breasts of mothers still striving to provide their children with some form of nutrition but present nevertheless. We have pockets of malnutrition and many undernourished in our country. The recent election campaign was a clear example of how the powerful exploit the hungry; and this exploitation is seen every day in different ways. The increasing and pervasive influence of the powerful Narcotics Drug Don. The desperation of the inner cities of Kingston. There is an area stretching from Spanish Town to Bull Bay and encompassing much of the areas close to the coastline of Kingston that have been overtaken by deep poverty, masked by drug dealing, crime and hustling that have created new forms of slavery and oppression in our country. Recent reports point to increasing poverty in rural areas.
The FAO report points out that infant hunger often deprives impoverished people of the one valuable resource that they can call their own - the strength and skill to carry out productive work. Hunger in childhood impairs both mental and physical growth, crippling capacity to learn in school and earn at work. Those of us, with full bellies, some growing fat as a result of the exploitation of the hungry, tend to write off those crippled by poverty as being worthless, lazy, and stupid. When they look like us, we are ashamed and want to distance ourselves from them in anyway possible.
The report states that more than 2 billion people worldwide suffer from micronutrient malnutrition often called "hidden hunger". Their diets supply inadequate amounts of vitamins and minerals such as Vitamins A and C, iron, iodine, zinc, folate and selenium. Is this hidden hunger, for example, affecting the academic performance of some of our children?
The diets of most of the people in the developing world in the past provided a lot of these nutrients automatically. Global agricultural trading practices and Food Aid, which like all things have its advantages and disadvantages, have distorted the diets of the people living in the poorer countries of the world and increased their dependence on imported food, changing their diets to less nutritious and less affordable ones.. Hardy, nutritious varieties of cereal and other crops have been replaced by higher yielding and less nutritious varieties that have pushed up production costs and marginalised farmers in many developing countries.
The report notes that severe poverty and hunger are concentrated among the landless or farmers whose plots are too small to provide for their means. More than 30% of the rural poor in Latin America and the Caribbean are landless.
