Our Planet is facing the most serious food emergency of 21st century that hits million people and children. In addition COVID-19 impacts have led to severe and widespread increases in global food insecurity, affecting vulnerable households in almost every country, with impacts expected to continue.
The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting the world as we knew it, with a heavy toll on human lives and economic activities. Its rapid global spread is threatening to affect millions of people already made vulnerable by food insecurity, malnutrition and the effects of conflictsand other climatic disasters caused by Global Warming.
The 2020 edition of the Global Report on Food Crises, that describes the scale of acute hunger in the world, estimates that 135 million people in 55 countries currently face acute hunger.
Furthermore, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), one of the United Nations organizations addressing hunger and food insecurity:
- About 800 million people in the world do not have enough food.
- The large majority of undernourished people lives in developing countries, where 13% of the population is undernourished.
- Asia has the highest percentage of people suffering from hunger in the world – accounting for two-thirds of the total population. In recent years, the percentage has decreased in South Asia, but has slightly increased in Western Asia.
- Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest percentage of hunger. One in four people is undernourished.
- If women had the same access to resources as men, 150 million people less would be starving on Earth.
- Almost half of deaths in children under the age of five (45%) are caused by poor nutrition, meaning that three million children die every year.
- One in six children (about 100 million) is underweight in developing countries.
- One in four children in the world suffers from growth failure. The ratio can increase to up to one in three in developing countries.
- 66 million school-age children (23 million in Africa alone), attend school on an empty stomach in developing countries.
- About 250 million people starve to death in Africa, even though the food produced in the world is enough to feed the 7 billion people living on Earth.
These are not only mere and objective data, but a tragic reality reported by authoritative sources such as the most important humanitarian organizations: WFP, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), OXFAM and Food First.
Although there has never been as much food on Earth as today, hunger is still an overwhelming problem that urgently requires a solution.
In a world where we produce enough food to feed everyone, too many women and men are not able to feed their children with a nutritious meal. In fact, 815 million people (ration 1:9) go to bed on an empty stomach, and 124 million people in 51 countries (ration 1:3) suffer from acute or chronic malnutrition.
The lack of food kills a person every 3.5 seconds per day. This means that in a part of the southern hemisphere one child dies from hunger every few seconds. In the meantime, in another part of the same world, about 12 tons of food are wasted. This proves that unfair distribution is the worst form of violence.
Life is based on the need for security, protection and secure attachment, as well as good nutrition which means wellbeing, health and hope. The lack of food leads to diseases, famine, poverty, mortality; in one word: starvation, dying of hunger in a psychophysical sense.
All this will force every mother to fight in order to guarantee her child the food he or she needs to survive, completely ignoring her own needs and living in constant anxiety and despair.
Providing an adequate nutrition during the first three years of a child’s life would be an ethically essential goal, an important way to act in the interest of all humanity and an investment for future generations.
Every year, 13 million children come into the world underweight and risk dying during their first week of life because their mother is malnourished. If the child survives, he or she will probably suffer from health problems.
In developing countries, one in three children under the age of five (53% of 9.7 million deaths) starves while in his/her most vulnerable age. In this moment of life, children should be most protected as they are more vulnerable and are developing their physical, emotional and mental potential. Undernutrition in the first years of life allegedly causes physical and mental issues and reduces learning abilities.
More concrete data: iron deficiency is the main form of malnutrition and it is dangerous especially for women in reproductive age and for children; it affects almost two billion people.
Vitamin A deficiency affects 25% of malnourished preschool children, it causes blindness and increases vulnerability to diseases.
Iodine deficiency is the main cause of mental disability and brain damage (19 million people in the world are at risk).
Symptoms are extremely serious: vomiting, diarrhoea and weakness until the skin completely detaches from the body.
Besides death, chronic malnutrition weakens children’s immune systems (acquired immunodeficiency) making them more vulnerable to diseases and infections. It causes visual impairment, a permanent state of fatigue and a consequently stunted growth.
For children who survive, malnutrition represents a life sentence, as it can damage their cognitive development and affect their adult lives.
Malnourished people are not even able to maintain basic vital functions (WFP – 10 Facts About Hunger).
The unsolved causes of hunger are well known:
- The increase in natural disasters due to climate changes (tsunamis, floods, thunderstorms) and drought which is the main cause of lack of food.
- Wars have doubled over the last 20 years, and food is often used as a weapon in conflicts - polluting water wells, cultivated fields turned into minefields and starvation forces people to leave their own lands.
- The absence of adequate structures and infrastructures dedicated to green rural economy (streets, irrigation systems, transports). For these reasons, the land is overexploited with industrial technology, representing a risk for fertility. The poorest countries also deal with other issues such as deforestation, desertification, salinization and erosion.
- Economic and social emergencies in third-world countries. These countries are not able to plan their future and provide an education, acquisition of technical resources and instruments. Furthermore, people can’t purchase raw materials to start a business and feed their families or communities due to the lack of money. All this causes a vicious circle of poverty (WFP).
- Therefore, in 2030 and 2050, 592 million people and 477 million people respectively will risk starving because of “The Trap of poverty”, the lack of investments in agriculture and the effects of climate change.
- 50% of 815 million undernourished people are trapped between bombs and trenches.
By 2050, the world population is expected to reach 9 billion people. If we do not behave proactively, about 24 million children will starve and almost 12 million of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where the emergency has increased due to the fact that nearly half of the population lives in rural areas and barely has access to drinking water, and only one in five people has access to toilet facilities.
The poorest populations only need minimum resources to grow edible foods and be self-sufficient. Such resources could be good seeds, proper agricultural tools and access to drinking water. Improving food storage systems would be an additional help for this solvable problem.
Education is the most important weapon against this problem. Educated people are more likely to succeed in getting out of the vicious circle of poverty, which causes starvation.
Hunger is the main risk to global health (and peace) and in developing countries it represents a cost of USD 450 million per year. However, USD 0.20 would be enough to provide a nutritious meal to a starving child.
About two in the three people who starve are women, who become insecure and anxious when experiencing their worst traumatic nightmare: the inability to feed their children. However, women are willing to change and will fight strongly and vigorously when they see a chance to improve their situations.
Women are the most capable at finding solutions. In many countries, they are the backbone of rural economy (usually supported by microcredit) as they grow, sow and work the fields until the harvest.
Hunger is the worst enemy of children, women, poor and weak people. It is the worst enemy of all those whose voices have been forgotten because too weak to be heard by those who could do something and should speak up for the vulnerable, disadvantaged and those in need. They must not delegate people to speak on their behalf and allow them to impose their voice and their personal interests (P. Freire).
Hunger and war are the main causes of economic migrations.
It is simple: under the need to migrate there is not only the desire to go away but also the very need to improve one’s own economic situation. In many cases, this means fleeing a country because of the lack of food.
It is easy to talk about this during plenary meetings, where tons of future projects are presented. However, how many of these good intentions are really carried on? How many data and real-life stories are being spread through mass media? Indeed, it is much easier to deny reality or even lie to go down the opportunistic way that global politicians love and use to feel satisfied and obtain people’s votes only to blame and sentence to death those who have left their homes, (using the hypocritical motto “let’s help them in their own homes”).
We live in an unstoppable world that is always changing, in which distances are eliminated in a mad and alienating way and, together, they multiply so that what could be and what could be done are always different. Real and significant changes are the hardest to be considered and achieved.
Over the next 50 years there will be crucial and unpredictable changes about new discoveries, inventions and knowledge. Will these changes go towards the common good and the improvement of humanity’s socio-economic status or will we keep caring about our personal interests instead of everyone’s best interest?
Possessive yearning is the most dangerous type of insanity: it makes people blind, insensitive, selfish and cruel. And, unfortunately, it seems to affect the most influent people, governments and markets in our so-called “civilized” world.
This is why the Black Horseman of hunger, famine and poverty keeps travelling undisturbed around the world, or at least exploiting and subjugating others to the most devious, intriguing, unscrupulous and evil powers of all: the economic power.
Although nowadays global production capacity is widely higher than basic needs – so it is theoretically able to meet our planet’s food requirements – contradictions have increased. This is called «Food paradox»: one in nine people is undernourished whilst 40% (mostly western populations) is overweight or even obese (one in ten) and frequently suffers from diabetes. For every person who dies of undernutrition, another one develops a disease or dies of overnutrition or malnutrition.
We all know that global production capacity has reached very high levels. Nevertheless, hunger – the most shameful problem of our advanced civilization – not only has not been defeated yet, but keeps growing more and more. This is the representation of a tragic social deprivation between populations and communities: wealth, resources and goods are not equally distributed and this makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. According to the latest Oxfam report, the growing socio-economic disparities are becoming the main topic of our era: global wealth increased by 82% but only for 1% of the population, and 50% of the global population did not take advantage of such increase. Furthermore, 1% of the population is wealthier than the remaining 99%.
Therefore, world hunger is almost entirely caused by human injustices, poverty and greediness, by the human desire to own and collect objects, refusing to equally share the resources given to us by the Earth.
Hunger and poverty are not problems of Others; they are our problems and they have to be solved by all of us, because the right to food and to an economically fair life is a fundamental human right.
Hunger is not a natural disaster; it has been caused by unfair and unstable policies, selfishness, exploitation, wars, financial crisis, oppression led by so-called civil countries that prefer to spend millions on agricultural exploitation technologies or on weapons of mass destruction, rather than tackling the issue of poverty.
Indifference reigns in the opulent first world. People clear their consciences with charity without being deeply involved, or by maintain a distance (e.g. by saying “I’ll give you some money as long as you stay away from me”), rather than committing to really helping or giving back to the poorest regions, and especially to Africa, dignity and full possession of their own economic and human resources.
As Confucius said: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”. This means that helping people increase their capacities, and along with Gaia’s life-saving resources will make them active players and will allow them to start a new future, developing our human potentials in the most suitable way.
In order to find innovative solutions, to design on-field developing programmes which will assure the best possible outcomes (e.g. projects that give microcredit to small agricultural producers, providing them with access to the agricultural market and the possibility to develop their own productivity and competitiveness) and to solve problems, we not only need to have willpower, we must be creative. This is the idea of our Foundation “Science for Peace.Eu”.
It is also necessary to invest in the latest technologies and scientific discoveries on prevention in order to decrease environmental risks and to plan appropriate responses to climate emergencies, natural disasters and pandemics.
Finally, access to two specific areas would end the inequality gap and decrease poverty in third world countries: access to information and telecommunication and access to the market. Everyone has access to new information technologies – which spread rapidly – thus closing the gap between powerful people and common citizens: the internet is developing exponentially, its cost is decreasing and can’t be controlled (an example are bloggers who spread news in anti-democratic countries as Iran, Libya and Syria). Social networks are hard to monitor and are being used to launch social initiatives and to raise awareness. Information technologies can help create a global context that unchains an inextinguishable potential of creativity, talent and productivity (M. Yunus).
Access to the market through free movement of goods, people and capitals would help poor people become part of bigger markets without being isolated in their small and poor part of the world. Only then, differences will become an added value, a treasure and an advantage for the entire humanity. The only thing to be proud of – which goes beyond national identities, GDP, incomes and local products and factories – will be the sense of belonging to mankind.
In conclusion, here is something that should give us food for thought: a child in North America consumes as much as 422 children in Africa, whilst a dog in a rich nation has 17 times more food than a child in a poor, third world country. By contrast, many children starve, until they die: children with no tomorrow who only know despair, often just because they were born in the wrong place. That is why we should all wonder: “how much does a tear weigh? The tear of a capricious child is lighter than wind, but the tear of a hungry child is heavier than the Earth” (Gianni Rodari).
God bless Gaia and our scientific and ethic referents.