As I read this sentence to you, a child somewhere in this world will have died of hunger. A child. Children are the weakest of us, the ones who implicitly trust everyone, the ones whose innocence is genuine and appropriate and necessary–and they’re in the far corners of the world starving until their skin stretches across their bones and they don’t have the energy, the will, or the wherewithal to cry out anymore. You may think of them with a deep sympathy, or a gut-wrenching pang of guilt, or a simple understanding of their plight. The moment you stop being faced with whatever causes that guilt, these children slip your mind.
They may not be in your thoughts, but they’re still starving until the deadly diseases which ravage their countries constitute sweet mercy. You may think there’s nothing you can do, but a dollar here and a dollar there seem to fall off your fingers without a second thought–dollars that could feed poor families for days. In order to truly solve the problem of world hunger, not only must someone go to these countries to change their infrastructure and offer help, but you must keep them in mind so that their plight doesn’t end up hidden. The first issue to address is diet.
Some countries have the means to supply children with enough calories to grow and prosper, but still they waste away and die. This is because of malnutrition. Lack of macronutrients (especially protein) and certain micronutrients lead to many fatal maladies. Kwashiorkor and marasmus are particularly nasty and tragically common variants of malnutrition–kwashiorkor arising from a lack of protein and marasmus arising from a lack of everything. Both cause children to turn into piteous pictures of skin and bones. In order to address this, the means to properly subsistence farm must be installed in all countries of the world.
Irrigation, non-native crops, foreign aid during times of famine, drought, and war, and most importantly education can be of great use in fixing the basic infrastructure of starving countries and providing food and proper nutrition for every single inhabitant. War is a common cause of starvation among the poorer people of the world. The starving out of people practically amounts to genocide, and is one of the most brutal ways to kill a person. The West holds the power to intervene in cases such as these. The West ignored the genocide in Rwanda, yet put millions of lives on the line to aid the Jews of Europe during WWII. Why?
Europe isn’t a couple of backwater African countries that can’t offer anything–and Rwanda presents no threat to the West. The simple hand of sympathy knows no compensation, however, and if it cannot be extended to those in need then it is not sympathy at all. The UN needs to address the issues which plague the less fortunate countries of the world–hunger and violence on a massive scale. The UN needs to intervene, because every minute they deliberate, more people have died. The UN needs to learn to extend a hand of sympathy rather than leaving it to reporters and nonprofit organizations to fix conflicts of an international scale.
Most importantly, however, is the biggest problem of all: the fact that at their most basic level, like all successful creatures of the Earth, humans take the path of least resistance. We need to make it a priority through advertisement campaigns, installation of drop boxes, and potentially even a restructure of the government based around allowing the UN to fund foreign aid would all be of tremendous help in ultimately picking up the pieces of broken societies and molding them into a working engine that will contribute to the movement of the world.
Most of all, we need to make hunger the problem of everyone, because truly, that’s what it is. We lose awareness because the problems we deal with are of an entirely different nature; however, if we give people a reason to offer a helping hand and show them why it’d be truly the best thing for everyone for them to do so, then we will have reached a point where we can begin something entirely new.
We must break down the problems of the world in order to lay them out, and then we must use these pieces to form the foundation of a new world, a world where people are informed, a world where people live on equal ground no matter where that ground lies, a world which can face the finer problems humanity deals with rather than still dealing with something we had the means to solve thousands of years ago. Hunger needs to be solved and can be; it’s just a problem of restructuring the world to accommodate all of its inhabitants.
