Fr Jim Carty sm, Australia, writes: "In the summer of 2015, three-year-old Alan Kurdi was found dead on a Turkish beach. His Syrian family had fled their war-torn homeland. The image of that drowned child in the arms of a soldier disturbed us all.
"In the fall of 2018, Amal Hussain died of a deadly disease: hunger. Her photograph appeared in The New York Times: undernourished, she lay waiting for death, without even the strength to cry. Amal was in a health centre where the nurses gave her milk every two hours. It was useless. She could not keep it down and also had severe diarrhea. In her war-torn country, Yemen, a hostile coalition had set up a blockade making it extremely difficult to obtain emergency food and aid.
These two depressing photos of two dead children in two warring nations can leave no one indifferent. Alan had no guaranteed meals in his native Syria, where the war continues to take lives and forces thousands to take refuge in overcrowded camps;
Amal was reduced to skin and bones. In fact, in five years of war in Yemen, according to estimates from Save the Children, the scourge of hunger has caused the death of 85,000 children.
The situation in this country is reminiscent of similar tragedies in Biafra and Ethiopia. This is a genuine humanitarian emergency. The Yemeni nation is the latest in a long series of famines that have struck humanity, the Encyclopaedia Britannica online provides a detailed, historical explanation.[2]
The famines of ancient Egypt are well known, the one that occurred in Rome in 5 BCE, those that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages, one during the pre-revolutionary era in France in the 18th century, the one that devastated Ireland and Scotland in the 19th century. China and India have suffered this calamity several times in the last two centuries. The Soviet Union faced four famines in the 20th century. Recently, North Korea found itself unable to feed its population.
It appears we are facing an endless problem, an endemic evil. Will humanity be able to heal this plague that has reappeared throughout history?
Jeffrey Sachs, the authoritative economist and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres says that, since the Green Revolution we have all been reassured that, although the world's population was continuing to grow, the supply of food would still outstrip demand. But now this certainty is seriously called into question.
Today, we are aware that a large part of humanity is malnourished and that, moreover, there are serious threats to food security and supply on the horizon.
For two reasons:
the first is that the population continues to increase, and we have already reached 7.2 billion inhabitants, with an annual growth of 75 million;
the second is that agriculture and livestock farming also contribute to a large extent to climate change, which is a threat to future production.
Malnutrition is a scourge, because it affects almost 30 percent of the world's population. It manifests itself as "chronic hunger" or malnutrition, which, according to the FAO, affected 870 million people in 2012. Then there is the "hidden hunger" of micronutrient deficiency, (vitamin and mineral deficiency required for optimal health), which leaves people weakened and susceptible to infections and diseases. This affects almost a billion people.
(An extract from La Civilta Cattolica)
The International Monetary Fund warned last week that the global economy was likely to experience the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, predicting global growth would contract by 3% this year because of the virus.
Addressing the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday (April 2020), WFP Executive Director David Beasley said the world was facing "the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two."
"At the same time as dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, we are on the brink of a hunger pandemic," he said.
Beasley noted that the WFP currently offers food assistance to almost 100 million people but warned that the coronavirus could make it difficult for them to be reached and urged the U.N. to provide more assistance.
"If we can't reach these people with the life-saving assistance they need, our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period," he said during a video conference. "This does not include the increase of starvation due to Covid-19.
"I must warn you that if we don't prepare and act now — to secure access, avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade — we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months," he said.
PS. Here is a video link- graphic, disturbing but do not avert your gaze:
Jpic blog – 27/04/2020
La pandémie de la faim
Ross Flint, Ordained Anglican, Tasmania, writes:
Is it not until a crisis affects or threatens ME, will we respond positively and creatively?
I would like to hear from you your thoughts on the following points made by the philosopher Charles Eisenstein. This is an extract from an essay relating to the Covid-19 crisis that he wrote in March:
Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me.
• Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them.
• Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA.
• Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA,
• the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA),
• or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million.
• Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?
Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=6
RKF - I edited this extract from Eisenstein’s essay by highlighting sections with bullets.
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