Wiping Out World Hunger

Industrialized nations tend to think the solution to world problems starts with policy development. For instance: how do we eradicate world hunger? First, assign a task force to study the issue. Focus on perceived causes, such as poverty, and effects, including disease and violence in the schools. Next, create a nutrition public policy. Then write an article on world hunger and circulate it to the task force members.

This industriousness can be effective-eventually. But when we're talking global famine, there isn't time for analyses that may span many months, years, or even decades.

Ending World Hunger Begins With Compassion

When we can get out of our heads and into our hearts, we usually discover a simple answer that was there all the time: redistribution of resources. But I haven't yet seen an article on world hunger that addresses the heart of the matter: namely, that it is possible to end world hunger through love and compassion, rather than via genetic engineering and deforestation.

We often grow the most during times of intense crisis, such as the recent cataclysm in Southeast Asia that took more than 150,000 lives and left millions more homeless. Response was immediate and global. No one needed to convene a committee to discuss world hunger, homelessness, poverty or pestilence; the outpouring of love, support and resources has been streaming in from around the world.

One Article On World Hunger Says Peace Must Precede Food

Some people are beginning to get it right. One article on world hunger proclaims that,"Only peace can end the food crisis in the Congo." With our world at war, how can we focus on creating fertile fields, or cultivating those that already exist? Peace and progress are key, reports this article. We may continue to blame illness, violence, and any number of other conditions on world hunger. But we may have it backwards.

A world hunger writer with a vegetarian perspective makes the case for "more equitable distribution of food resources" through greater agrarian output. This article also touches upon another key element fueling famine: misleading advertisements.

Are We Growing More Grain to Feed the Starving-Or Livestock?

We see ads in popular magazines for starving children in developing nations, perhaps accompanied by a touching plea about world hunger written by a celebrity, and pull out our checkbooks or credit cards. Yet, according to this source, "75% of the grain sent to third world nations goes towards livestock production. This livestock ends up in the U.S. and Western Europe."

India Is Hungry, Yet Government Pricing Causes Wheat Exports!

Finally, a little-known economic factor created by governments can actually cause world hunger, as investigative journalist Thomas Sowell explains in his thought-provoking treatise on world hunger, unemployment and price controls. India, wrestling with rising malnutrition and hunger, nevertheless is exporting a huge surplus of wheat. Why? Because, says Sowell, the government of India is keeping the price of wheat artificially inflated-which the U.S. government has been doing for more than fifty years as well, leading to chronic agricultural surpluses here.

Is it any wonder that public policy creation doesn't strike most thinking people as the best route to wipe out world hunger?