[Food For Thought] How to Solve World Hunger
This unit in our humanities class, Food For Thought, we have been talking about death and the struggle of getting food on our plates. In the last unit we focused on how the food got here, where's this unit we talked about all of the hands our food has gone through and the horrible conditions those people have to deal with. We talked about farmers in Mexico and California, Residents near factories, and truck drivers. We also talked about the struggles of hunger and malnutrition. This Action Project is a position paper, so our opinion, on what we think the best course of action for effectively solving world hunger. We then read our position paper out loud in a little bit of a speech. I talked about SDG 2's (ending world hunger) target 2.2, which is ending malnutrition in children and pregnant as well as childbearing women, providing some possible solutions that could be achieved.
Script
144 million children, who are the future of the human race, have their growth stunted. SDG 2 is Zero Hunger, and one of the targets, specifically target 2.2, which addresses maltreatment in children as well as pregnant and childbearing women. This is a global priority because, well, that's the future of humanity. If we allow these children to be born, just to die, how can anyone claim to be a kind person? The children didn’t choose to be born into this world and yet they still have to suffer because of older generations screwing up. The majority of hunger, especially in women and children, are in third world countries where there aren’t programs to help them. There are plenty of people who would just be willing to give them food, but that is an even worse solution because it takes money away from the farmers already there. The solution is to invest money into sending seeds and people to teach how to garden and get them started, as then they will have a sustainable food source.
The end goal here is to have no hunger at all, and this specific target is to have children and childbearing women not be hungry. This is a massive problem right now because 690 million people, or about 8.6% of the entire population, are undernourished, with 144 million of those being children. Being this hungry causes the stunting of growth, and wasting, as well as death. 144 million is an unpicturable amount of people. It’s almost half of the entire US. You probably don’t even know 144 million people. It is crucial that we figure out a way to help these people. When it boils down to it, you do care, whether or not you can push it out of your mind
History repeats itself, and this is no exception. We have gone through periods of mass hunger before. The solution is similar but not completely the same. Back in the dark ages, we went through a period of serious hunger. People were forced to farm and were only able to farm enough for themselves. A lot of people starved or died from disease. According to Empires of food, “For centuries, an imperial network of farms, warehouses, shipping lanes, paved roads, and soldiery had filled the cooking pots of millions of city dwellers, particularly in Italy. That vanished with the Roman legions.” (Fraser and Rimas) The common solution here is for one group of people to make advances in technology, in the dark ages it was the monks and in the modern era it’s first world countries, who then go around and, whether intentional or not, spread the knowledge. The biggest difference however, was that the dark ages had a bit of a push, in that, there was the Bubonic Plague. The Black Death killed about half of Europe, which provided plenty of land and resources to all of those who survived. This is technically an option nowadays, especially with bioweapons, but it’s also very inhumane and could very easily get out of control, even with just Covid-19 as an example. It wasn’t even a bioweapon but it still caused mass shutdowns.
You most likely have heard of the old saying, give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for life. This definitely applies here. Sure we could just ship food to these hungry people, but unfortunately that would cause more problems than it solves. There are some people who can farm in these countries, and they sell it to make a living. Shipping food takes away that source of income from the farmers, and keeps the people who can’t farm reliant on shipping food from halfway across the world and so if that system were to fail, then these people are even more screwed. Instead, the solution is to send teams of people to these countries and have them do two things. First, teach the people who don’t know how to farm, to farm. This ensures that they can support themselves and are able to eat, as well as the more people who know how to farm, the less people need to farm because eventually you get a stockpile of grain.
The second thing is to teach them how to make wells and maintain them. A crucial part of hunger is thirst, so making a well solves that problem, as well as plants need water. Wells are difficult to build, so if a group doesn’t have the means to make one, the people we send down there would make it and teach the group how to maintain it. Of course, the issue becomes how do you fund possibly thousands of people going to these countries, and the answer is the top 1%. These uber rich people collectively own about 74.925 trillion dollars, and even high estimates say that it would only be about 0.35% of their total reported net worth, which would easily get made back in a heartbeat. This of course would be very, very hard to do as the only government large enough to impose a worldwide tax is the United Nations. There would be a lot of pushback, and it would be controversial, but that is what needs to be done.
Topic Sentence: So in conclusion, I believe the best solution to this problem is for the US and other first world countries to deploy large groups of people to go to these third world countries and teach them how to sustain themselves better, make their land ready to be cultivated, and give them a jumpstart with seeds and the such. This would help make sure that all of the children and childbearing mothers are kept well fed, as well as the rest of the population. All of this would be funded by the top 1% as it is just a drop in the bucket for them. Of course there will be pushback and controversy, but that’s where you come in. I am just a teenager, but if anything like this starts getting the process started, you can help spread the message and try to get this problem solved.
Sources
“Goal 2 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs.” United Nations, United Nations, 2015, sdgs.un.org/goals/goal2.
Steverman, Ben. “The U.S. Is Where the Rich Are the Richest.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 16 June 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/the-u-s-is-where-the-rich-are-the-richest.
“How Much Would It Cost To End World Hunger?” GlobalGiving, 1 Mar. 2021, www.globalgiving.org/learn/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20how%20much%20money,to%20%24265%20billion%20per%20year.
G., Frase Evan D, and Andrew Rimas. Empires of Food: How Civilizations Revolve around the Dinner Table. Free Press, 2010.
The end goal here is to have no hunger at all, and this specific target is to have children and childbearing women not be hungry. This is a massive problem right now because 690 million people, or about 8.6% of the entire population, are undernourished, with 144 million of those being children. Being this hungry causes the stunting of growth, and wasting, as well as death. 144 million is an unpicturable amount of people. It’s almost half of the entire US. You probably don’t even know 144 million people. It is crucial that we figure out a way to help these people. When it boils down to it, you do care, whether or not you can push it out of your mind
History repeats itself, and this is no exception. We have gone through periods of mass hunger before. The solution is similar but not completely the same. Back in the dark ages, we went through a period of serious hunger. People were forced to farm and were only able to farm enough for themselves. A lot of people starved or died from disease. According to Empires of food, “For centuries, an imperial network of farms, warehouses, shipping lanes, paved roads, and soldiery had filled the cooking pots of millions of city dwellers, particularly in Italy. That vanished with the Roman legions.” (Fraser and Rimas) The common solution here is for one group of people to make advances in technology, in the dark ages it was the monks and in the modern era it’s first world countries, who then go around and, whether intentional or not, spread the knowledge. The biggest difference however, was that the dark ages had a bit of a push, in that, there was the Bubonic Plague. The Black Death killed about half of Europe, which provided plenty of land and resources to all of those who survived. This is technically an option nowadays, especially with bioweapons, but it’s also very inhumane and could very easily get out of control, even with just Covid-19 as an example. It wasn’t even a bioweapon but it still caused mass shutdowns.
You most likely have heard of the old saying, give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for life. This definitely applies here. Sure we could just ship food to these hungry people, but unfortunately that would cause more problems than it solves. There are some people who can farm in these countries, and they sell it to make a living. Shipping food takes away that source of income from the farmers, and keeps the people who can’t farm reliant on shipping food from halfway across the world and so if that system were to fail, then these people are even more screwed. Instead, the solution is to send teams of people to these countries and have them do two things. First, teach the people who don’t know how to farm, to farm. This ensures that they can support themselves and are able to eat, as well as the more people who know how to farm, the less people need to farm because eventually you get a stockpile of grain.
The second thing is to teach them how to make wells and maintain them. A crucial part of hunger is thirst, so making a well solves that problem, as well as plants need water. Wells are difficult to build, so if a group doesn’t have the means to make one, the people we send down there would make it and teach the group how to maintain it. Of course, the issue becomes how do you fund possibly thousands of people going to these countries, and the answer is the top 1%. These uber rich people collectively own about 74.925 trillion dollars, and even high estimates say that it would only be about 0.35% of their total reported net worth, which would easily get made back in a heartbeat. This of course would be very, very hard to do as the only government large enough to impose a worldwide tax is the United Nations. There would be a lot of pushback, and it would be controversial, but that is what needs to be done.
Topic Sentence: So in conclusion, I believe the best solution to this problem is for the US and other first world countries to deploy large groups of people to go to these third world countries and teach them how to sustain themselves better, make their land ready to be cultivated, and give them a jumpstart with seeds and the such. This would help make sure that all of the children and childbearing mothers are kept well fed, as well as the rest of the population. All of this would be funded by the top 1% as it is just a drop in the bucket for them. Of course there will be pushback and controversy, but that’s where you come in. I am just a teenager, but if anything like this starts getting the process started, you can help spread the message and try to get this problem solved.
Sources
“Goal 2 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs.” United Nations, United Nations, 2015, sdgs.un.org/goals/goal2.
Steverman, Ben. “The U.S. Is Where the Rich Are the Richest.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 16 June 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/the-u-s-is-where-the-rich-are-the-richest.
“How Much Would It Cost To End World Hunger?” GlobalGiving, 1 Mar. 2021, www.globalgiving.org/learn/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20how%20much%20money,to%20%24265%20billion%20per%20year.
G., Frase Evan D, and Andrew Rimas. Empires of Food: How Civilizations Revolve around the Dinner Table. Free Press, 2010.
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