THE PHOTO on this page, dear readers, saddens me and makes me feel quite helpless. It shows Ahmed Hersi, a 4-year-old child, being treated for malnourishment at Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. By the time you read these words, he will probably have died like the thousands of other children in his situation, for grim statistics reveal that a child dies every six seconds from hunger and related causes.
Every day I look into the eyes of many children who visit the Basilica. These children have no inkling of what their peers in the global South are going through, and my thoughts run to their mothers who are always fretting about the fact that they may not be receiving enough affection or enough of those extra vitamins, while Ahmed’s mother, on the other hand, was fretting about the fact that her son was not receiving the bare minimum to survive!
The most recent estimates reveal that 925 million people in the world are undernourished, a figure that has increased since 1996. Children are the most visible victims of malnutrition, and those who are malnourished suffer up to 160 days of illness each year. Hunger plays a leading role in at least half of the 11 million child deaths which occur every year. Under-nutrition magnifies the lethal effects of every disease, including measles and malaria. According to the most recent estimate I could find, malnutrition, as measured by stunting, affects 32.5 percent of children in developing countries – one in three.
Geographically, more than 70 percent of malnourished children live in Asia, 26 percent in Africa and 4 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. In many cases, their plight began even before they were born because their mother were malnourished . Under nutrition among pregnant women in developing countries leads to 1 out of 6 infants being born with low birth weight. This is not only a risk factor for neonatal deaths, but it also causes learning disabilities, mental retardation, poor health, blindness and premature deaths.
In 1996, 180 nations met for the World Food Summit at FAO headquarters in Rome to discuss ways to end hunger. They pledged to eradicate this scourge, and committed themselves to a basic target: reducing the number of undernourished people by half within 2015.
Now, with three years to go, it is clear that we have failed completely in meeting this goal. To make matters worse, the situation is actually getting worse: in 1996 the number of people desperate for food were 830 million, but now that number is beyond the 925 million mark. “We are facing the worst food crisis of the last 40 years,” said the new president of FAO, José Graziano da Silva, “and there is no time to lose”.
Those who are only concerned with their own wealth and prosperity without giving a whit to the plight of millions in Asia and Africa are not only guilty of extreme selfishness, they are also refusing to consider humanity’s future of which they themselves are a part.
It is no excuse to say that we are in the midst of a global recession, that the money in our bank accounts is dwindling while per-capita debt is increasing and GDP is decreasing. When faced by the shocking number of young children destined for death, we cannot remain inactive. How can we help them? In the simplest and most direct of ways: by taking those hard-earned dollars or euros out of our wallets.
To combat hunger in the world we need to collect at least 44 billion (44 thousand million!) dollars a year. We are called to engage ourselves in a long and painstaking solidarity effort. This money would mainly be pledged to small farmers in the global South, for it makes no sense at all to just give money away to the poor without tackling the root causes of poverty.
If you think that 44 billion dollars is an astronomical sum, I can tell you that I wholeheartedly agree with you. In fact, my first conclusion was that we would never be able to raise that much money! This changed, however, when I was reminded that the world spends 750 billion dollars on armaments alone every year. That sum of $44bn to combat hunger is a mere 6 percent of that!
We should not look for any excuses to shy away from a duty that is incumbent on all of us. Look at that child’s eyes: do you really have the heart to turn away?
Updated on October 06 2016