I want you to picture a classroom of kids. If it helps, cast your mind back to when you were in school. Picture yourself sitting at your desk, with all your friends and classmates around. Give or take there should be around 30 kids in the room.
That’s how many children will die of hunger and related causes in the time it takes you to read this blog post. Not because hunger is inevitable or unavoidable, and not because there isn’t enough food to go around, but because world leaders haven’t tackled the problem with the urgency it deserves.
Merrick and Rosso were the first to sign ActionAid's petition calling on Kevin Rudd to take hunger seriously. Pictured from left to right: ActionAid youth reporter Olivia Dunnfrost, Merrick Watts and Tim Rosso.
Last Friday (16 October) was World Food Day. It’s a good time to reflect on the one billion people – close to a sixth of humanity – who don’t have enough to eat. This is perhaps one of the most shameful achievements of recent history, since there is no good reason for anyone to go hungry in today’s world.
Even before the food and financial crises, the number of people facing chronic malnutrition was extremely high, and falling extremely slowly. Since 2005, it has jumped by 20 percent. An extra 170 million people have been pushed into hunger – equivalent to the populations of Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Germany combined.
Without concerted action by world leaders, the worst is yet to come. Food prices remain stubbornly high in developing countries; the global recession is hitting jobs and incomes; and climate change is battering rain-fed agriculture.
The heaviest price of rising world hunger, however, will be paid by our children. Already nearly one in three of the world’s children are growing up chronically malnourished. As a result, many will die before the age of five. Those who survive are likely to suffer irreversible cognitive and physical damage. They will complete fewer years of school, and earn less as adults. Their immune systems permanently impaired, they are 12 times more likely to die from easily preventable and treatable diseases.
In 2000 world leaders approved the Millennium Development Goals which committed them to halving hunger by 2015. Although hunger has actually increased in that time, it’s not too late to turn the tide around.
ActionAid’s report “Who’s Really Fighting Hunger”, released today, shows hunger, is not inevitable. It can be beaten.
Countries such as Brazil, China, Ghana and Vietnam have taken great strides towards ending hunger, by translating the universal right to food into concrete actions such as investing in poor farmers, and introducing basic measures to protect the vulnerable.
Brazil, for example, has managed to reduce child malnutrition by 73 percent and child deaths by 45 percent in just six years, by introducing food banks, community kitchens and locally produced school meals, along with support for smallholder family farmers.
China, meanwhile has reduced the number of undernourished people by 58 million through heavy investment in supporting its poor farmers and a relatively equitable distribution of land. Now less than nine percent of the population goes hungry.
Examples such as these, show hunger can be beaten with the right combination of political will and resources.
Rich countries like Australia also have a role to play, although our efforts to date have been underwhelming. ActionAid’s report, which ranks countries based on their efforts to combat world hunger, places Australia 17 out of 22 developed countries.
The bad news gets worse as UNDP’s 2009 Human Development Report found that Norway, Australia and Iceland have the best standards of living and highest levels of human development in the world. Therefore we should be ranking in the top three in our efforts to combat hunger rather than languishing near the bottom of the table.
Our current ratio of overseas aid is just 0.33 percent of gross national income. Even with a commitment from the Rudd Government to increase aid to 0.5 percent by 2015, we will still lag behind the internationally agreed target of 0.7 percent.
In particular, Australia isn’t giving its fair share of aid towards agriculture and social protection. Our weak carbon emission reduction targets of just 4 percent by 2020 against 1990 levels – much less than some other developed countries and substantially below the 40 percent reduction needed to avoid catastrophic climate change add to our failure to give the world’s poor a fair go.
It’s time for Australia to step up and say it cares about the classroom of children dying of hunger-related causes every three minutes. Australia can and should do more.
There are two things Kevin Rudd should do to start tackling hunger seriously.
Firstly, he should personally attend the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s World Food Summit in Rome in November and push for an increase in aid and government budgets and an increase in the amounts allocated to sustainable agriculture.
Mr Rudd should also personally attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and commit to reducing Australia’s carbon emissions by 40% by 2020.
It’s not much to ask when a classroom worth of children are dying in the time it takes to read a blog. Is it?
**Show Kevin Rudd you care about hunger. Sign the petition now!**
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