Somewhere in El Pais (Madrid newspaper) today and in other newspapers across Europe and the United States there will be any article, an announcement on the major dietary obsessions of men and women in rich countries: how to lose weight, how do to not eat so much?
By Rafael Ruiz, English investigative journalist
While many of us would sell our souls to get the magic pill that would allow us our fill of churros, chorizo \u200b\u200band fried eggs without gaining weight. and (of course) without increasing cholesterol levels, there are 800 million people worldwide who go to bed hungry every night. And more than 800 million are overweight or obese. According to the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, an agency Thoroughly devoted to accumulate such data.
More statistics, all United Nations: Every five seconds a child dies of hunger, one in five American children is dangerously overweight, 10 million people die each year from hunger or diseases that cause and exacerbate malnutrition , the world produces more than enough food for all human beings, the world's total budget given by the governments of rich countries for the development of poor countries is 50,000 million dollars a year, the U.S. budget for war in Iraq (according to official U.S. figures) so far and twice that amount.
Hunger, which directly or indirectly kills nine times more people every day than died in the Twin Towers in New York, is the most extreme manifestation of poverty possible, of human failure.
Reduce the numbers of hungry people in the world by half has been identified as a priority within the United Nations Millennium Goals for the next 10 years. Besides
organizations in the UN there are 1,200 NGOs committed to this effort. In order to establish why there is so much hunger in the world, EPS has surveyed the views of representatives of the UN, especially the World Food Programme, NGOs, including Ignasi Carreras, director Oxfam general; of academic specialists on the subject, and pundits, bankers, doctors in Africa, the continent where hunger is endemic and devastating.
not everyone agreed on everything, but as there was consensus that the answer to the question was more complex and diverse than you might think people who have not delved into the subject. Here, in a synthesis of information gathered, there are eight reasons why many people in poor countries are starving while many in rich countries die from eating so much.
The little faith in the great capitalist countries in the free market
One of the biggest scandals in the world, one that everyone recognizes but few who could do something about dealing with the necessary seriousness, is the subsidies that farmers in the United States and Europe receive from their governments.
international trade rules are so unfair that if the same principles apply in a football game would cause riots. It is as if a referee at a France-Burkina Faso had been paid by the French to assure that all goals of the African team would be canceled, and, perhaps, half of the rival expelled before the end of the first half.
The Bush administration spent 4,000 million dollars a year in subsidies to their farmers. What this means in practice. Is that, for example, cotton farmers in Senegal go bankrupt.
Americans flooded the market and the Senegalese expelled him. What is almost worse, dump cotton producing countries themselves or corn or sugar with cheap raw materials, making local farmers can not even compete with imported products. The image of obese citizens of Iowa, State agricultural excellence, contrasted with that of skeletal Ethiopian perfectly captures this great global injustice.
Obesity, malnutrition masks.
Europeans are just as guilty. Do exactly the same with other products, one of the reasons why some Africans, fleeing hunger, climbing on boats in Morocco and (if lucky) reach the English coast, causing problems to come, at least in part, of the unfair competition of which they are complicit Spain and the rest of the European Union.
Wars and general insecurity
The worst cases of famine in Africa in recent years have given in times of war. The fragile balance that allows that, while people starve, survive, is broken and what is now happening in Sudan and Ethiopia 20 years ago.
Wars displace people from their ancestral lands, destroy the food infrastructure, block physical access to food from elsewhere and leave their mark, for example, the death of individuals who know how to cultivate the land, the affected communities take years to recover.
In Afghanistan, the volume of anti-personnel mines buried in various military conflicts that have taken place since 1979 has made more than half of agricultural land can not be cultivated. The Europeans who remember the Second World War or the English Civil War, understand war = malnutrition equation. For a young English or French, today is almost unimaginable. Dan
fish when there is famine, but not taught to fish when there is not
rich countries respond well when disaster strikes, but they have not managed to do is to help avoid or create the conditions for The problem of endemic hunger disappear. Or at least not with the necessary commitment.
One such example is Ethiopia, a country in the world where there are more hungry. In 1984, Irish singer Bob Geldof brought together some of the best musical artists of the period and recorded a song to raise funds for victims of the terrible Ethiopian famine of that year. The initiative is called Band Aid and managed to raise much money. Today, Geldof, Bono and 40 other artists have done the same. In this case for the victims of Darfur, Sudan.
The problem is that in the 20 years that have passed since that great awakening of consciousness that Band Aid International represented the problems of Ethiopia are the same. There is no famine today, the level of 1984, but permanent hunger itself.
In a context in which international aid to poor countries has been declining, which Ethiopia has received a senior UN official described as physical "regrettable" from the outside. In a good year when the crops yield at top, between two and three million people Ethiopia need food from the World Food Programme and other international agencies. In a bad year, the number rises to an amount between 12 and 15 million.
Grains: while growing production, distribution is in few hands.
The problem is: l. Except as Band Aid outbreaks every 20 years, people in rich countries are not interested enough to pressure their governments to invest more in helping the poor of the world that new submarines. 2. While reacting swiftly and effectively and blunt (not skimp on investment), when major crises, such Darfur, there is little desire to work slow gradual, unglamorous (away from the cameras of CNN) is required to be gaining ground slowly, mind hunger. and thus preventing the great famines before they occur.
There are loves that people kill and accommodates the survival
While international aid is insufficient, it is sometimes too much. It creates a dependency problem that makes entire communities lose the habit of feeding themselves.
In Rwanda, a poor country that has received much food aid since the 1994 genocide, a government minister complained in a conversation a year ago that his people, or much of it, had lost the habit of work to cultivate their land.
had always lived at a subsistence level, but now the livelihood not from their own work, but the weekly truck delivery of food. Unable to conceive, and this has everything to do with lack of education-a higher ambition than mere survival (which exasperated the minister, a woman who had studied abroad), had stopped worrying about developing the economy local. They lived the life almost of zoo animals.
Not very dignified, perhaps, but laid back, quiet. An alternative example, but that leads to the same conclusion, is that of those living in areas Angolans as remote rural areas during the war that never received assistance.
Now that the country receives less aid than in those times of crisis, they-those not accustomed to having their basic needs met by people falling from the sky, those best adapted, those who can organize their lives productive, responsible and effective. "When you have to do it, and said Ignasi Carreras, of Oxfam," Wise up people. "
diseases Malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis cause hunger. Not only that hunger causes disease. Because the more ill with malaria is a man in Mozambique live in a rural area, the less likely you are to work in the field and feed his family, and feed themselves.
With thereby creating a vicious disease, more disease-hungry, hungrier. So is sinking a family, community, country. Not only affected the amount of food to eat, but also the quality. The proportion of carbohydrates compared to proteins in the diet increases the more poverty there, (The Atkins Diet, which can consume all the proteins you want as long as you do not touch carbohydrates, definitely not for poor people, even USA).
This in turn implies a deficiency of micronutrients derived from iron, zinc, iodine and vitamins. It can survive without the amounts of these micronutrients considered basic in the West, but you can not keep a healthy lifestyle. The vulnerability is extreme.
geographical determinism
weather and other unavoidable forces of nature can have a decisive effect on the eating habits of people. Countries where hunger is the hot countries of the earth, which are located between the latitudes of the tropics. These countries are on the one hand, more vulnerable to drought or flooding-a-weather violence that the northern countries. On the other
hand there is the paradox that, historically, more fertile country than cold, are less at the mercy of seasonal swings. A person who does not have any income will be able to survive on their own in the jungles of Congo. Will be able to find food in the trees more easily than a person without income in the forests of Finland. In prehistoric times, living in the Congo rather than in Finland was an advantage.
As Jared Diamond has in his book on the evolution of civilization is that the humans who inhabit the cold and inhospitable countries are forced to find ways of preserving food for winter, the planning for future. For example, before refrigeration, using salt. This made the need to preserve the relationship with food to become more sophisticated in northern countries than in those from Ecuador or South:
Charity begins at home
The solution to the problem of hunger is very simple identify and very difficult to carry out: development. Unless you are particularly unfit or have very bad luck, the people who live in North America, Europe or Japan will not go hungry. There is malnourished. And live to be 75 and older. In Africa there are 30 years younger.
Ignasi Carreras is in the business of helping the hungry. but he has clear: food is not present in the medium or long term solution. "The most important thing is that people know how to make a living. It stands on its own, "he says.
hunger poverty is simply carried to its ultimate expression. Thus, logically, we must fight poverty, give people the means and conditions for them to get rich. This implies first, addressed the seven problems mentioned earlier in this article without excluding international cooperation.
fair, responsible and focused wisely. But above all, as understood by Carreras and, among many more, "the Nobel Amartya Sen, one must seek to create democratic societies in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. This does not mean much commotion elections set of factors, rule of law, free media of communication, which lead to the creation of a civil society whose values \u200b\u200bare more durable than any government or political party. Hunger is not a problem of crop failure or lack of land. (In Japan they eat better than in Argentina).
is a problem with human origin. Is due to poor choices of certain people, especially the ruling classes. The more responsible and prepared to be the people in power and the more generous people in countries with problems of basic survival, are determined, be less hungry in the world. The problem is that all this, as evidenced by the history of the species is a tall order.
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