Putting “Hunger” in Perspective — The Perspective of 1.2 Billion

“1.2 billion women, men, and children are suffering from chronic hunger right now,” even though they “live in a world with an abundance of food.”

Around here, there’s much love and respect for our friend Natasha over at the Voracious Vegan. She is an activist not only for nonhuman animals but also for her fellow humans, and she is currently in the middle of Day 4 of an experience that few if any reading this will ever experience, whether by choice or by circumstance: she is exploring, for 7 days, what it feels like to go hungry, inspired by a 21-day effort by Kenda Swartz Pepper, another compassionate and passionate vegan whose awesomeness I’m just now learning about via Tasha and whom Tasha credits for the idea and inspiration.

And “hungry” here is not hungry like when you miss breakfast or have to eat dinner hours late because there was nothing vegan at the event you attended. Not hungry like when you go on a single-day fast. Hungry like the chronic, devastating hunger experienced by “the 1.2 billion women, men, and children who are chronically undernourished” around the world, who never get remotely enough to eat, who are slowly starving: “a lack of food [that] results in the death of millions of people every year, simply because they have no food.” And they’re dying not because of lack of supply — there’s plenty of food to go around the globe — but because of systems that are denying them food (and as many of us know and as we’re sure Tasha will explore, animal agriculture and thus the consumption of animals in the wealthy parts of the world are an enormous contributor to world hunger*). She laments in her Day 2 post,

The 1.2 billion women, men, and children who are suffering from chronic hunger right now live in a world with an abundance of food. This fact makes my head spin. The world produces 17% more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, in spite of a 70% rise in population, and yet 35,000 people will die today from hunger related causes because they are not able to have their share. The fact is chronic hunger is not caused by a lack of food, it is caused by poverty.

In our world this poverty is not a rare condition, it is, in fact, the norm for most of humanity. Almost ½ of our planet, 3 billion people, live on less than $2.00 a day. 1 out of every 2 children alive today exist in poverty, 640 million people (that is twice the population of the United States) live without adequate shelter, 400 million people have no access to safe water, and 270 million people have no access to health services.

In many cases this poverty is not an aberration or an unfortunate tragedy; it is a central requirement of our global system dominated by ‘free’ market capitalism. This system is often referred to as ‘globalization’ and is premised on ever expanding markets, cheap raw materials, and even cheaper labor, and it thrives on the exploitation of the weak and the powerless. In a world with finite resources the only way some people can be very, very rich, is if other people are very, very poor.

There are organizations (including vegan ones) working to solve the problem of course, but solutions aren’t going to come without some massive changes in the way our world works.

Tasha has given much background and written about the causes and effects and people’s experiences in important detail in her post introducing this souljourn and in her Day 2 post, and I highly recommend you read them and continue following along as she documents this experience (she is already feeling the disorienting physical and mental effects as of Day 4). We could all learn something here. She is chronicling the experience both at Voracious Vegan and at the Conducive Chronicle. Please also explore Kenda Swartz Pepper’s account of her 21 days (scroll to the bottom for the links to the days). I haven’t had a chance to read through myself yet (deadline! deadline!) but plan to soon.

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*Note: Dawn Moncrief of FARM was kind enough to contribute her expertise on world hunger and its causes to a couple guest posts on The Previous Blog a while back; look for those to be republished here soon.