25,000 people starved to death today, including 10,000 children
Been that way every day since the pandemic started.
<aside class="pullout" style="border: 0px; color: rgb(64, 64, 64); font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-family: Helmet, Freesans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9375rem; line-height: 1.334; margin: 18px 0px 24px 16px; padding: 0.0625rem 0px 0.1875rem; vertical-align: baseline; float: right; clear: both; width: 197.172px;">There is enough food for everyone, but not everyone has enough food, says the Enough Food for Everyone If campaign.
"...There's a real temptation to use those kinds of statistics because they really do grab the headlines - you can't ignore that because it's such a horrifying image," says Jane Howard, from the WFP.But, she says, it is "a bit misleading".
The WFP itself once used to claim that a child died of hunger every six seconds, but stopped using this slogan around 2008.
The numbers can change from year to year, Howard points out, depending on the latest research, "and it gets very confusing because the old figures end up lying around on the internet".
And more importantly, she argues, "the science is actually saying something quite different".
So what is the science saying? Well, if, to you, the claim that one child is dying every 10 seconds because of hunger conjures up images of starving children, you might be surprised.
In most cases, that's not what's happening.
"There are certainly extreme circumstances where children starve to death - and I'm thinking of the recent famine in parts of Somalia," Howard says.
"But the truth is that the vast majority of those numbers that we're talking about, are children who, because they haven't had the right nutrition in the very earliest parts of their lives, are really very susceptible to infectious diseases, like measles.
The If campaign highlights an important issue, but is it wrong to use the word "hunger" if it might inaccurately suggest children are starving to death?
"I could understand if members of the public made that inference, and that would be mistaken," Lundie says. "We're not saying that children in this particular instance are starving to death, and we explain exactly how it works. But I think the term 'hunger' is something that people relate to."
The fact that poor nutrition is identified as an underlying cause of death means that there's also some double counting going on. When you hear that one child dies every few seconds from water-related diseases, for example- or from poverty - some of these children will be the same ones that are said to be dying every few seconds from hunger.
Another surprise is to discover who these children are and that they are often not even, as the adverts sometimes put it, "going to bed hungry".
Most of the nutrition-related deaths are in countries that are not suffering from famine or conflict, according to Professor Robert Black of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States, who calculated the three million figure that the 10-seconds statistic is based on.
"These are not the poorest countries in the world. They are countries such as India or Nigeria or many other countries in Asia or Africa that really could do better - that have the resources to feed children within the country.
"Certainly the poorest have the greatest problems with undernutrition, but even then there might be sufficient food to feed children. The difficulty is achieving a high enough quality diet - a diet that is dominated by cereals or starches would not be a high enough quality diet to achieve the nutrition that's needed in the first two years of life."
In most cases, the problem could be resolved through nutrition education, Black says.In some cultures, women don't get to eat the best food in the household, which can mean children are born underweight. Milk and meat may also be avoided for cultural reasons, as they are in parts of India for example. And sometimes it's just not fully appreciated how important fruit and vegetables are.
A quarter of the deaths can be attributed to inadequate breast-feeding, Professor Black estimates, -with many families not realising that, up to six months of age, babies need to be exclusively fed on breast milk for the nutrients it provides, but also because it protects them from exposure to contaminated food.
starvation will get worse as the global economy becomes further depressed.
So says Nostradamus the prophet & seer of the future, lol. Who has failed to provide any evidence that more children are starving to death in 2020.
But the fact is your statement above is not a guaranteed prophesy of the future that will 100% come to be. Instead it is just guesswork, not necessarily will be the case, not at all. If the risk of starvation increases due to - yet another economic downturn (which has happened repeatedly before) - governments, aid organizations & poor countries need to step up their funding & efforts so that more starvation does not occur. That's why aid organizations have been appealing for increased funding.
The sheer fact that you think life should be fundamentally altered for 7.8 billion people because of a virus that kills 20% as many people as starvation is proof of your idiocy. I don't need to expand on that.
Something like starvation will trail a global depression. The impact won’t be immediate. You moron.
"People who are starving are usually doing so because they're somewhere where the population has surpassed the food supply. It was most likely charity that allowed this to happen in the first place, but regardless, we're now in a situation where many people are starving.
If we send money to feed them, we will amplify the problem even more. They will become dependent on us as they return to normal health and start once again to have normal lives. But here's where the problem amplifies. They, being the human beings they are, will procreate. They are already overpopulated past their food supply and now they're going to make it worse. What they should be doing is reducing their population.
So what should be done? We can choose to not feed them and let the population even back out, but it's hard to sit idly by while allowing that kind of suffering to happen. However, it beats amplifying the problem like I explained above.
However, there's a third option that can downsize their population while allowing people to be healthy and well-fed. It's a bit controversial, but it's humane because it's for the greater good. We can offer to feed them, but only if they're willing to be sterilized (meaning they can no longer procreate). The process shouldn't be done to all of them, of course, because otherwise that would be genocide. It should be done in a controlled manner overlooked over generations until their population reaches a level that can sustain itself based on the food supply in the area.
affluent nations like the USA.....???? Really? You fucking IDIOT! https://www.usdebtclock.org/ .. Now tomorrow is the 3rd,go cash your welfare check
Are affluent nations like the USA just going to let even more people in the most poor nations starve to death?
They've been allowing many to do so for decades, so that wouldn't change anything, then, would it?
Out of sight, out of mind.
"How do rich people justify not helping starving people...In third world nations people who can barely feed themselves have 4 children....Why are those people starving in the first place? Why are they having kids when there is not enough food? If they are doing that anyways, any efforts to help are doomed. You feed one, they multiply until you cannot feed them anymore."
https://www.quora.com/How-do-rich-p...e-they-thinking-when-they-decide-not-to-do-it
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-the-rich-of-this-world-feed-the-starving-of-this-world