Excerpt:
"Some mothers choose what their children will eat. Others choose which children will eat and which will die.
Those mothers forced to make the grim life-or-death choices are the impoverished women Patricia Wolff, executive director of Meds & Food for Kids, encounters during her frequent trips to Haiti.
Wolff says Haitians are so desperate for food that many mothers wait to name their newborns because so many infants die of malnourishment. Other Haitian mothers keep their children alive by parceling out food to them, but some make an excruciating choice when their food rationing fails, she says.
"It's horrible. They have to choose among their children," says Wolff, whose nonprofit group was formed to fight childhood malnutrition. "They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go."
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies." Four decades later, King's wish remains unfulfilled. The global food market's shelves are getting bare, hunger activists say -- and it will get worse.
Food riots erupted across the globe this year in countries such as Egypt and India. Food pantries in the United States also warned that they were running out of food because of unprecedented demand. The news from the World Food Programme is even grimmer: A child dies of hunger every six seconds, and hunger now kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined."
5 comments:
This is scary. And I think it will get bigger, worse, more widespread.
It did make me think about your canned goods and water ;)
I've been watching it coming -- and I fear it is going to be very very bad soon.
Cost of goods, the collapse of world economies, drought, waste, you name it.
And because it's not twenty cents to package relief meals instead of 10 and because our own stinky economy is pinching off giving for food, we will be able to give only a third to a fourth of what was given last year for relief.
These are facts -- and the snowball is starting to roll down the hill...
I have wondered about this since I was challenged, along with others in a seminary class, to remember that in the US we are the only culture in the world that pays to lose weight. There are other cultures in which no amount of money will buy food. People can argue about politics but it must be recalled that starving people will go with whoever will actually ensure they are fed--it is called Maslow's hierarchy.
And remember, in this culture, helping others has the awful monicker of welfare. grumble...
BTW, thanks for visiting my blog!
It sure is a worrying article. It reminds me of the need to reduce my meat intake.
Answers not easy but desperately needed.
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