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TechnoratiUS Needs to Take Lead Against World Hunger
Where are the leaders? The news media is AWOL, with ABC staging the most insulting presidential debate in memory. The administration is fixated on peddling Iraq's calamities as progress. The presidential candidates, intent on throwing the "kitchen sink" at each other, ignore the fact that the house is on fire. And a silent assassin goes unmentioned.
Across the world, hunger is on the rise. The World Bank estimates that average food prices have soared by some 83 percent over the last three years, and 100 million people may be pushed into poverty as a result. In Haiti, the poor eat "dirt cakes" to put something in their stomachs. Food riots have convulsed more than a dozen countries -- from Egypt to Mexico.
For Americans, rising food prices are part of a big squeeze, with gas prices more than twice what they were a year ago, health care costs soaring, and wages simply not keeping up. But as the New York Times notes, even the poorest 20 percent of Americans spend only about 16 percent of their budget on food. Rising food prices hurt, and hunger is rising in this rich country. Food kitchens are having a hard time meeting demand across the country. But for much of the developing world, soaring food prices are about survival, not sacrifice. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. People living on $2 a day can't scrimp on luxuries to pay for rising food prices. They go hungry. In Bangladesh, garment workers strike over the cost of food. The price of rice, the staple of their diet, has increased by one-third since last year. Experts say 30 million of the country's 150 million people could go without daily meals.
The causes of the soaring prices are many -- and they will only get worse. Demand is rising as India and China develop. Global warming disrupts traditional weather patterns. Subsidies for corn-based ethanol have driven up the price of corn and led farmers to move to that crop. Subsidence agriculture has been devastated by a global trade system that features subsidized agribusiness food exports. And now the rising price of oil increases the cost of transporting that food.
Emergency aid is needed right now, both for our neighbors like Haiti, which is our responsibility since we displaced its government, and for the world. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a global effort in his visit here. He got little attention. The U.N. secretary general is raising alarms across the world. He gets virtually no press. This is, as Jean Ziegler, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on the right to food, said, "silent mass murder."
About $500 million is needed now to replenish emergency food relief. We spend $12 billion a month on Iraq. On Wall Street, hedge fund operators earn $3 billion in one year. Yet the call for emergency funds has thus far not been met. In fact, overseas aid from developed countries went down, not up, last year.
This is a matter of human decency. It is a measure of what kind of people we are. But it also concerns a clear and present danger to our security.
Have no doubt: Growing hunger and desperation in a global world will devastate people, destabilize governments and generate more kindling for terrorism. If the U.S. leads, it can help revive its reputation in a world that has been alienated by this administration's arrogance. If the United States does not lead, it surely will contribute to resentment around the world. It is a time for leaders to stand up.
--Jesse Jackson
© Copyright 2008 Digital Chicago, Inc.
19 Comments so far
Show All… damn,
and I thought that we had the best Israeli leaders,
that money could buy …
Where are the leaders?
Where are the people who regard their position and views as being superior to others? They're all over the place.
Where are the people who think that holding a different opinion makes you intellectually or morally subordinate? All over the place.
Where are the people who think others should listen to them, even while they ignore others? They're everywhere.
The idea of leaders encourages arrogance in some and passive aggression in others. It gives delusions of both grandeur and powerlessness - often to the same people at the same time. It denies any idealistic notions of intrinsic equality and destroys the most basic premise of even our feeble attempts at democracy.
Leadership is not the solution. It's the problem.
[Apologies for avoiding the food question. This one's closer to my usual soapbox.]
World hunger is being increased by the higher cost of food staples, due to their use for making automobile fuel....
Today we know with accurate precision that one ton of corn can only render as an average 413 liters of ethanol (109 gallons), a figure that may vary according to the latter's density.
The average price of corn in US ports has reached 167 dollars per ton. The production of 35 billion gallons of ethanol requires 320 million tons of corn.
According to FAO, US corn production in 2005 reached 280.2 million tons.
Even if the President is speaking about producing fuel out of switchgrass or wood chips, any person could understand that these phrases are far from realistic. Listen well: 35 billion gallons, 35 followed by nine zeros!
Beautiful examples of the productivity of men per hectare achieved by the experienced and well organized US farmers will come next: corn will be turned into ethanol; corn wastes will be turned into animal fodder, with a 26 percent of proteins; cattle manure will be used as raw material for the production of gas. Of course, all of this will happen after a great number of investments, which could only be afforded by the most powerful companies whose operations are based on the consumption of electricity and fuel. Let this formula be applied to the Third World countries, and the world will see how many hungry people on this planet will cease to consume corn. What is worse, let the poor countries receive some financing to produce ethanol from corn or any other foodstuff and very soon not a single tree will be left standing to protect humanity from climate change.
Other rich countries have planned to use not only corn but also wheat, sunflower seeds, rapeseed and other foodstuffs to produce fuel.
If Barack Obama were half the man that the Rev. Jesse Jackson is, he would be out front on the world hunger issue. He would be promising that as president he would make sure that the US was not contributing to the problem by reducing trade barriers to poor countries goods, reducing the use of food for fuel, and changing our AID policies to encourage locally grown food, plus using whatever surpluses we have to increase food for our own poor and to ship food directly overseas to the hungry (not forcing the agencies to sell the food in the poor countries, undermining their agriculture.)
So where is Obama on the real issues (while he is taking plenty of corporate contributions and contributions from the lobbiests' spouses???
throwing money at the problem is not the answer, its a crutch.
Real change will only come when these people decide to get rid of the deadbeats running their countries and elect real leaders.
Why should the rest of the world be obligated to pay Africa for its own failures
The US should not take the lead against world hunger today. The US already took the lead against world hunger once with its "green revolution" and we all know the result of that. The US only uses crises such as world hunger as pretexts to build markets, custom designed to best serve the interests of producers. This is pure corruption, kind of like the cops arresting suspects to earn kickbacks, instead of improving public safety. Sooner or later such corruption erodes the society and breaks it down. Sooner is already past - it's now later - and the society is on its knees. The green revolution is destroying the biosphere through climate change, ozone, and soil depletion. The petro-capitalists are creating chaos with the food supply. The farmers are pigeon-holed into growing what the capitalists dictate. More people are starving, thanks to their dependence on the unreliable capitalists, deliberately created by the capitalists.
The US should not lead in anything. Its ideas/methods are dysfunctional and destructive. Instead the US should back the hell off. The World Peasant Movement is demanding land, water and food security for all. Let it be done. Back off, capitalists.
We are leading, who do you think is causing it?.
ALEX LAWYER: Indigenous teacher/writer Dhyani Ywahoo calls that approach "the beauty path." In astrology Venus represents beauty, justice, love and/or concern for others. I often mention in this forum that most of US resources are directed towards Venus' antithesis: Mars. Policing forces, the military, weapons, spying, the use of force, the socialization tactics that make ours a pro-bully me-first society, etc. Sure, your plan is better, and good karma is always the optimum investment plan, both in THIS lifetime and regarding those to come.
I was musing that if there are 500,000,000 hungry people, and if we could feed each for $1 day--both pretty realistic back-of-the-envelope figures--we could do the job for the same amount we're now spending on the war in Iraq. Imagine if we used food instead of cluster bombs as a tool of foreign policy. Would people hate us so much they hurl themselves into buildings at 600 mph? Would we be called the Great Satan? Would people burn American flags?
In Nigeria they spend 73% on food.
Vietnam 65%.
Indonesia 50%.
Nigeria has a lot of oil. All the money from the oil goes to a few rich and the Americans and Europeans who support them.
Vietnam is recovering from being raped first by France and then, especially, by the US of A.
Indonesia has likewise been enslaved in repression and exploitation of the people under Suharto's dictatorship aided and abetted by the US and Europeans.
The animosity toward Vietnam continued after the war to such an extent that when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and stopped the holocaust there, the US and the Brits supported Pol-Pot, the mass murderer of 2 million Cambodians, in the U.N. and gave him Cambodia's seat. The reason, get this , was because Vietnam invaded Cambodia and no country can be allowed to invade another except with a U.N. mandate (the atomic bomb club). Plus there was also a US embargo on Vietnam.
Leader, yeah, right.
The world does not need a criminal rogue nation as leader of anything. The world needs for the US to stop abusing everybody. The US has done nothing but harm for at least 200 years. The US doesn't lead, it sucks the blood out of nations. Leeches are not made to lead. Parasites don't lead. The US is the enemy, not the leader, of the world.
Trouble is if you want American aid you have to change things the way America wants in your country. This is why parts of the world will never get American aid at the cost of millions lives.
"The USDA report, Household Food Security in the United States, 2007, says that 38.2 million Americans live in households that suffer directly from hunger and food insecurity, including nearly 14 million children. That figure is up from 31 million Americans in 1999."
The God-blessed United States of America needs to take the lead against hunger in OUR COUNTRY FIRST, JJ. Only then can we go forth to become the "supermarket to the world," as price-fixing thieves ADM used to say...
This whole "global food crisis" is such a crock of shit. We've done it to ourselves again by putting profit before everything else. You hear alot about how China and India's demand for food is the main culprit for the rising prices, but I would say more that it's the rich commodities traders driving up the prices by using food as a tool to make artificial profits. Our whole economic system is completely retarded and one of the stupidest things we ever did to ourselves. It's time to start growing your own food and quit being fat wasteful Americans.
Go into any restaurant in the States and order something... what comes to your table is a massive pile of food that no human should completely consume. Perhaps if you cut down on the amount of food you waste, there could be more for those that don't have any... just think of the sheer number of french fries that end up in the trash every day... tons of potatoes I'd suspect... enough to feed many people.
I remember when Jesse was running in Minnesota as a presidential candidate. He was doing better than I had hoped and I thought he might really make it and I remember one of my favorite cousins of my mother saying back around then that Jesse would make a good President. Both of us being Scandinavian, I was surprised that an old farmer who was 91 or so when I last saw him believed much like me and also said he thought the next war the U.S. would be involved in would be in the Middle East and would be about oil. Imagine, a guy who married my mother's cousin and living on a farm in Minnesota, also hoped Jesse would be our next president.
Sometimes you wish the right people would be in power to make choices. It all gets changed around. I have so long seen the absurdity of choices made over time that if you know what's going on you can only hope. However I have now come to believe that nothing now can save this country with its historically unique or projected 3 trillion dollar debt, unlike any in history. I saw the movie about Commodus and the death of the Roman Empire. I am 66 now and have loved a wonderful woman for more than 7 years now and do what I can to make her happy; she is my first priority. But it isn't so easy. I ran up a debt of over $70,000 when a Canadian hospital saved my life in 2006 and the V.A. didn't cover it as expected, nor did Medicare, nor did Prudential, because American institutions apparently don't want much to do with Canada and when it happened I was about 12 miles north of the American border at my love's home. So people can tell me what they want, but even though I served my country (Disabled American Sucker) and so did she, we really served the oil companies and now I don't even have a place and she at least has a place in Canada. I am glad when people do well. We are muddling through for now but I can only hope there will be a country to be from a year from now. I hope everybody makes it.
The US has taken the lead to exacerbate the food crisis. It would therefore be against the best interests of the people making a fortune from the food crisis to try to mitigate or end it.
The US Federal Reserve started cutting interest rates in August 2007 and appears to be postured to continue doing so.
The cuts are devaluing the US Dollar, providing cheap money to speculators (the ones that brought you the housing bubble the last time the Fed provided cheap money) to inflate food costs.
The US is putting pressure on other Central Banks to cut interest rates and that will make the food problem even worse.
Sophie's choice - food or fuel
I read that African mothers are down to feeding their children a mixture of salt, lard and mud. Perhaps our Great Decider will pass along the recipe for our children. How does it work is our SUVs?
Coalition on the Global Commons - ending hunger, saving the planet, and creating framework for sustainability, economic and socal justice and citizen empowerment on a global scale
http://www.Global-Commons.org
I wonder what we would do in order to "take the lead." We could grow all the food that's eaten in the U.S. in the U.S. and stop importing food from any country where any percentage of the population is underfed, but that (as with addressing the oncoming oil shortage) would require a restructuring of the entire global food marketing system. Some purported expert I saw on the news last night said there was currently enough food grown to feed the earth's population but that the problem was "distribution." And hoarding for profit. How would we go about taking the lead in eliminating hoarding for profit? Wish I knew.