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As a North American traveling and doing research on hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, I’m often struck by the contrasts between the United States and whichever country I happen to be in. The abundance and cheapness of food in the U.S. is something, I have to admit, I miss.
In Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, where I’ve spent the last month, drought has exacerbated already high food prices, millions of livestock have starved to death, and 23 million people in the horn of Africa are at risk for starvation. But when I opened the paper on Monday, I was struck by the irony of just how similar Africans and Americans can be.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food insecurity in the United States, the richest country in the world, is at a 14-year high. Forty-nine million people in the U.S. lack what the USDA calls consistent access to adequate food. This increase of 13 million over the last year, according to the New York Times, was more dire than even the most pessimistic predictions about how the economy was impacting peoples’ daily lives.
While Americans aren’t starving because of lack of access to food, it’s troubling that poor families are cutting back on food purchases, which can have a whole range of impacts on child health. Single family homes headed by women, says USDA, are the worst off—another reminder that, just as here in Africa, women and children tend to suffer the most from poverty and food insecurity.
Meanwhile the World Food Summit is wrapping up in Rome this week and very little has been said, so far, about environmentally sustainable ways of alleviating hunger and poverty in rich and poor countries alike. As the effects of climate change become more and more evident and the global economic crisis continues, the world needs better ways of producing food that nourish both people and the planet.
5 Comments
We have been worring more about feeding the African people more than our own since I was a kid.
Africa doesn’t seem to worry about that, and is more interested in their well off becomming more well off.
The place where life supposedly began, and much of it is still like it was when it began. Whose fault is that?
With all the riches that Africa posseses it has been plundered and used to make others in the world rich.
The why in that is that the African people don’t do anything to help themselves. They will work for others, but won’t take care of themselves.
They don’t start and run plantations, dig mines, drill for oil, or manufacture goods on their own. If You think Africa is poor and starving, picture it if the other people in the world had left it on it’s own. There would be no cities, big or small businesses, most of the Animals would have been killed off, and none of their minerals, gems, and oil would have been discovered.
They would be living as bush people starving even worse now than in the past because they would have used up all the contenent gave them.
They would be dying off from desease, and from over population.
The day the African people start making something of themselves, should be the day we start worring about them, not like we have for Centuries.
We keep sending aid over there, while our people get worse and worse off.
we are the wealthiest country on earth. we should be able to do both. the fact that we are able to do neither is a testament to how corrupt and broken our country has become. 50 million hungry, 18 million chronically hungry, out of a country of 308 million, has nothing whatsoever to do with our level of development or the quality or quantity of our food supply. It has everything to do with the failure of democratic institutions and the sclerotic moral and now fiscal failure of our politicians, and the fact our country continues to be held hostage by thuggish, millenialist, teabagging ideologues. This isn’t a byproduct of rapid development, as was hunger in Dickensian England or in today’s urban slums in South Asia. This is about misrule and the decline that misrule causes – more akin with Caligula. This is a silent and completely man-made Katrina, and there is absolutely no excuse for it.
I agree with You 100%.
First of all, Africa is a huge continent with many different countries, languages, governments, climates, ethnicities etc, so it is not fair to talk about Africa as if it were a single entity. Your view of Africa as backwards ignorant contact is probably generally informed by the horrendous media coverage of African countries in the United States. You would probably do well to educate yourself on their histories and economies. I would start with Angola. What you find might surprise you.
They don’t start oil companies (Nigeria is an exception), or diamond mines or anything because largely African countries do not own their own resources. Those resources are still held by colonial powers and/or companies and families from the colonial era.
I am not sure who you meant by “we” but if you meant the United States you might want to know that we send relatively little aid to African countries largely for our benefit. Foreign aid as a whole in the form of food has devastating effects on local African economies which can no longer be competitive against free or extremely cheap food. However who food aid does help is American farmers.
Your post is incredibly misinformed and I’m surprised no else called you out on it. Perhaps you were writing from a place of anger, but I can assure you that helping African countries is no threat to us but more of a threat to African economies.
The whole continent of Africa is a disgrace to the world and mankind, and I don’t care what You think.
They were the first people they should be the greatest society. Time has been on their side.
You proved my point Yourself by saying by saying things are still held by the colonial powers. Had it not been for the colonial powers, they would still be bushman.