Hunger

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday announced a $214-million roll-out directed at 14 global "hunger hotspots". The measure comes as nearly one billion poor people worldwide grapple with the "unrelenting global high food and fuel price crisis", the Rome-based WFP said in a statement. The $214 million will help provide food rations to highly vulnerable groups; continuing to feed school-aged children even while school is out and giving supplemental food to pregnant women and young children whose mental and physical development is at stake, WFP said. In addition, the money expands food assistance to urban areas hardest hit by high food prices, including through vouchers and support for small farmers and markets in countries where WFP will purchase food assistance locally.

They call it the green hunger. Four-foot cornstalks sprout from rain-soaked earth, and wind billows fields of teff, the staple Ethiopian grain. Goats and cattle are getting fat on lush grasses -- but the children are still dying. Once again, images of emaciated children are emerging from this Horn of Africa nation, rekindling memories of the 1984 famine that killed nearly 1 million people. This time Ethiopia has been grappling with a double whammy: drought in its traditional breadbasket and a global food crisis that has pushed prices sky high. Although recent rains and an influx of humanitarian aid have experts cautiously predicting the crisis might be stabilizing in parts of the country, nearly 10 million people will need emergency aid to survive until the harvest in September.

Bread for the World president David Beckmann today warned that the recent collapse of global trade negotiations, called the Doha Round, will adversely affect the world's hungry and poor people in more ways than the negotiators realize. Even before the current hunger crisis, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 862 million people go to bed hungry. Today, the World Bank estimates that rising food prices are putting an additional 100 million people at risk of falling deeper into poverty. The Doha Round reached an impasse after the United States, China, and India were unable to agree on when developing countries can impose emergency tariffs on products like sugar, cotton, and rice in case of a sudden rise in imports.

More than 14.5 million of the world's poorest people living in five countries across East Africa need immediate help, the United Nations said, 3.6 million more than during the last food crisis of 2006. Soaring world food and fuel prices, worsening conflict and disease have intensified the effects of chronic poverty and climate change which has brought ever-more frequent droughts. In Kenya's parched far north, close to Lake Turkana, a herd of more than 200 goats yesterday fought two dozen camels for space around a withering waterhole in Kaeris village, 47 miles east of the district capital, Lokitaung. "Our livestock are dying, there is no pasture, the little money we have cannot buy anything in the market because prices are now too high," said Lukas Ingolan, 55, a Turkana tribe elder squatting in the shade.

Benedict XVI is calling for solidarity and responsibility in national and international policies on water, saying water is a right and profit should not be the only reason to protect it. There is a "right to water," based on the dignity of the human person, and it is not simply an "economic good" the Pope affirmed in a message to the international exposition on "Water and Sustainable Development," under way in Zaragoza, Spain. In regard to the right to water, the Holy Father also stressed that it is "a right that is based on the dignity of the human person." It is "from this perspective that positions of those who consider and treat water only as an economic good must be carefully examined."

With the price of oil shooting upward, food security a danger for billions of the world's poor, and climate change already taking its toll on crops, water, and health, members of the Group of 8 rich nations need to cooperate now - and not make vague promises for the distant future. Tomorrow's crises have arrived, and they are intertwined. The food shortage is caused partly by oil prices and global climate change. And the industrial countries' addiction to carbon-based fuels has the world's climate at a cataclysmic tipping point.

During the 1992 campaign, some Democrats proposed a controversial 50-cent-a-gallon increase in the gas tax to reduce domestic consumption and encourage alternatives to oil. Since then, gas prices have risen by more than $3 a gallon, resulting in individual suffering and aggregate benefits. Alternatives to oil and coal -- from wind to solar to nuclear -- are suddenly more economical in comparison. Chevrolet and Toyota are only a couple of years away from offering plug-in hybrids that could average hundreds of miles to the gallon. But our other demand-driven crisis -- food inflation -- is simply a curse since there is no pleasant alternative to eating.

There was a glimmer of good news in the global food price crisis when Japan announced it will release a portion of its imported rice stockpile and the High Level UN Food and Agriculture Organization secured financial commitments for short-term food aid and increased research and development into new seeds and the distribution of fertilizer to small farmers. Nonetheless, the dismal state of affairs in the global food situation underscores the need for US leadership in addressing a world agricultural system that is facing new challenges and a painful transition.

What would it really cost to end global hunger? The United Nations estimates that it would take at least $30 billion per year to solve the food crisis, mainly by boosting agricultural productivity in the developing world. Over the decade that it would take to make sustainable improvements in the lives of the 862 million undernourished people, that amounts to $300 billion. Three hundred billion dollars is a lot of money, and the U.S. government won't foot the bill alone. But it's less than half of 1% of the world's combined gross domestic products, not an unreasonable sum to invest in ending the misery and degradation of hunger.

For many days now, British, French and American ships loaded with relief supplies have been sitting off Myanmar’s coast, waiting for permission to enter that country’s ports. The aid is urgently needed. Almost a month after Cyclone Nargis left at least 134,000 people dead or missing in Myanmar, the United Nations estimated that almost 60 percent of the two million people affected by the catastrophe had yet to receive assistance. The primary culprit for the delay is Myanmar’s intransigent military, which appears to be more concerned with preserving control over the population than with saving the lives of their fellow countrymen. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at last extracted a promise from Myanmar’s government on May 23 to allow more humanitarian aid into the country, yet relief agencies and Western nations are skeptical that the junta will follow through with all the necessary visas and bureaucratic assistance.