A Paper On World Hunger

The Cost of Western Greed

D is a single mother of 2 intelligent children who are both college students. She works 7 days a week in the front of her house changing oil in people’s cars for very little money. Her children have to come and go with great caution in their neighborhood because it is the second most dangerous one in all of their country. D has some friends in the US who invited her for an all-expenses-paid visit, but the United States government refused to give her a visa to visit. The reason was plainly stated to her. She was too poor. Why is it that so much of the world is so very poor? It is the fault of the rich and greedy west! One third of the world is starving to death while people are growing more and more obese in the US. The west has an abundance while people like D are barely getting by. There are many costs of the greed of the west.

First, our greed for oil to make our gasoline is ridiculous and even though gas prices are soaring here in California to over $4, people still insist on buying large SUV’s that guzzle obscene amounts of gasoline. You may only think that this affects the fool who buys such a large vehicle, but it actually affects the world. As the demand for oil goes up due to the larger vehicles that people are buying, the price for oil also goes up because they know that people need to buy it and that they can get away with making the prices higher. When the price goes higher, so does the price of everything else because most things have to be shipped to where they are sold and this takes gasoline. The most critical thing is the price of food. This may just be an annoyance to those of us who can afford to buy at least enough food to sustain ourselves, but it pushes the price of food beyond the reach of other people who just flat out don’t make enough money to buy it. Those people have several choices to get food and I will name two here. They can do the democratic thing and protest the high prices, but they may starve to death in the process. They can steal food, but they risk the penalty in their country for theft, which could be quite severe depending on the laws of the country. So while we drive around in our large vehicles with air-conditioning and complain about gas costing us so much, someone in Africa is starving to death in the 100+ heat because they can’t afford food.

So what can we do? This is really a global problem, so no one can do it all by themselves but there are some things that we can all do. We could take public transportation in some situations where it actually goes where we need to go and when we need to go, which I know is quite a stretch here in California since the public transportation is so crummy. We could invest in smaller vehicles. Personally, I drive a one-cylinder motorcycle which gets around 60 miles per gallon. Hybrids are also an option, but for God’s sake, buy a hybrid that is a car, not an SUV since that would not be conserving much gasoline at all. Having a smaller vehicle will cut down the demand for oil, which means that the companies will have to compete again for the best price since people will be able to travel to cheaper gas stations to get gas since they won’t have to get it as much. If this doesn’t work, at least there will be extra money in your pocket that you can use to help the poor and starving people of the world.

Another reason that the price of food is so high in poor countries is that the west imports all the food that is produced in those countries. “36 of 40 of the hungriest countries in the world sell food to us instead of us sending food to them.” (Lecture 4/9/2008) Look around. We are a very obese country. Not only is obesity terrible for our health and perhaps lethal over time due to illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes, but it is quickly lethal for people in other countries because they are starving to death while we eat up all their food. Another part of the problem is the demand for meat here. “It takes 12.5 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef protein so food is taken from the people who need it.” (Lecture 4/9/2008) Instead of feeding the poor, we feed our cows and pigs so that we can eat them later! We choose pigs over people and cows over children.

There are several things that we can do to lessen this problem as well. One of them would be to eat less meat or stop eating meat altogether. If the demand for meat decreases, maybe the fields where the animals are currently will start to be used for growing more food for people around the world. Another added benefit of not eating meat would be that it would keep animals from being abused and meat from being tainted due to the high demand for it. Too much meat is not healthy for you either, especially when the meat is cheap such as what is found in our hamburgers here. Cutting some of it out of our diets would not only be a start to helping the starving people in the world, but it would be healthier for us as well.

Another thing we could do, even if we refuse to eat less, is to at least not order more than we can eat. Here in the US, a decent meal can many times be found in the trash cans of others. When a pizza is not picked up from the pizza delivery place, it is often thrown out right in the box. If the fast food place makes your order wrong and you return it, they throw it right into the trash! Some grocery stores throw out dented cans of food. Providing that these cans are not dented along the seal of the metal, the contents is perfectly good but people don’t want to buy it because it is dented so they will throw it out. There may not be much we can do about that besides perhaps waiting for the pizza trash to come out for the night, but restaurants are not the only ones who throw out food. What do we do with that extra bit of food that we can’t eat? Some of us may bring the extra home and put it in the refrigerator, but many times, the food is just thrown away. Now maybe you wouldn’t eat after someone else that you didn’t know, but I will tell you one thing from personal experience, if you are hungry enough, you will wolf it right down. So what we could do to minimize the amount of food that is wasted is to make sure that we have accurately communicated our order and to order only the food that we are actually going to eat.

The last option I will give to help people in the world who are starving is to donate food to them. You could invite one of the homeless people that you see out to eat with you. You could probably both use the company and the food. You could sponsor one of those children from the commercials. You could visit a poor country and feed the people there yourself. You could also help them get a farm started or find them some other way for them to provide for themselves. Not only would that be a life-saver for those people, but it would be a good experience for you as well. Now say you are like me and you really don’t have any money at all, but you want to help. I found a webpage where you can click on a little icon and the sponsors of that page will donate to the poor and starving throughout the world. The webpage is here: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1 All it takes is a click and someone is 1 cup of food richer. You can click once a day. Another thing you can do is protest against the treatment of the people in other countries and the exploitation of the natural resources of their country. You may not think that you, as one person, can do much, but if you do nothing, you are a part of the problem. It may take an army of “one-persons” to change things, but if all of those people refuse to act because they are only one person, then people will keep on starving to death day after day.

Finally, what is more important than just talking about the world hunger problem is doing something to solve the problem. You may read this essay and think, “Yes. That is so sad that people are starving to death and we are certainly responsible”, but if you do nothing to help solve the problem, then you might as well burn the pages that contain these words because they have not served their purpose. Action, not words, is the only thing that will solve the world hunger problem. Remember, non-action is actually an action.