Hunger Is Not a Place

[nosmokes]

Hunger Is Not a Place

by Frances Moore Lappe original
The Nation, Jan. 23, 2006

"Within a decade no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry," declared
Henry Kissinger. That was three decades ago.

Since then hunger fighters have periodically reminded us of our
failure--most recently Time magazine Person of the Year Bono, Jeffrey
Sachs (The End of Poverty) and the Make Poverty History campaign. Such
impassioned calls again and again rally us to believe that, yes, we can
end hunger. Yet sadly, they fail to challenge the very frame blinding us
to solutions.

In that frame we in the industrial countries have the answer--what Sachs
celebrates as the "dynamism of self-sustaining economic
growth"--and our job is to help the poor get their "foot on the ladder."
But hunger is not a residual problem to fix "over there"--a place,
mainly in Africa, left off this hunger-ending ladder. Rather,
hunger is a global system that we're all part of. This hunger-making
system is alive in Africa, where one in three people goes hungry, but it
is also alive in the United States, where hunger has grown by 43 percent
over the past five years, and close to one young child in five lives in
a family so poor he or she can't count on getting needed nourishment.
The system is very much alive in Asia and Latin America, too.

Yet our frame determines which pieces of this picture we can see. We
applaud, for example, India's high-tech boom and its poverty reduction.
But we can't register that nearly half of India's children younger than
4 are still underweight, or that more hungry people live in India than
in all of sub-Saharan Africa. We're also blind to what is happening in
Kerala, the state that has been India's hunger-fighting champion--long
before anyone heard of call centers or outsourcing. Kerala is invisible
because it doesn't fit the frame: With per-capita wealth only average
for India, Kerala has reduced infant deaths to one-quarter the national
rate. The frame also blinds us to progress in Bangladesh. With a
per-capita GDP less than two-thirds of India's, Bangladesh has a child
death rate nearly one-fifth lower than India's.
~snip~
.
.
.
--###--
complete articlehere