CNN: Many Haitian mothers wait to name their newborns because so many infants die of malnourishment

[Amerigo Vespucci]

As children starve, world struggles for solution



A Haitian boy begs for food. One child dies from hunger every six seconds, an aid agency says.

By John Blake
CNN

(CNN) -- 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.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/17/hunger.week/index.html

[Doctor Cynic]

1. Believe it or not, this is common practice in many parts of the world.

[midnight]

2. I wish we would throw as much money into ridding the world of

poverty as we do to rid the world of terrism........

[soothsayer]

4. It's a kind of terrism that leads to poverty. (it's a gov't thing, not a food thing, generally)

Awful.

[slipslidingaway]

3. K&R :( n/t