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In a world of paradox and plenty, 852 million people are starving while one billion people are overweight, with 300 million of them considered medically obese.
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Since hunger and famine are still widespread in parts of Africa and Asia, the international community is in violation of the right to food as a basic universal human right, according to a new study released by the United Nations. "Despite promises to eradicate hunger, there has been little progress in reducing the global number of victims of hunger," said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report. More than 852 million people -- about 13 percent of the world population -- do not have enough food each day to sustain a healthy life, according to the Rome-based Food and Agriculture organization (FAO). |
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 On September 19, 2006, the global civil society coalition, Social Watch, launched its annual Report “Impossible Architecture” in the city-state of Singapore. This report was launched in the same location and at the same time that the World Bank-IMF held their Board of Governors annual meeting. However, the conclusions of the Social Watch report were dramatically different from those being reached within the WB-IMF conference halls.
As was to be expected, the WB-IMF insisted that important headway was being made in the fight against poverty to such an extent that Paul Wolfowitz in his opening speech, entitled “The Path to Prosperity” declared that “history was being made in the fight against poverty”. In that very speech, and in reference to the wealth that was so evident in Singapore , and, in particular in the “splendid convention centre”, Wolfowitz commented the following:
“But the wealth we see around us today is an inspiring reminder that there is a road out of grinding poverty to prosperity.”
(The complete speech can be found at: http://web.worldbank.org)
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’17,107 farmers in India committed suicide in 2003. Many of them were facing in surmountable obstacles in the 15 years after India opened its agriculture to global competition.’ [1] INTRODUCTION Extreme poverty is one of the half-dozen or so major scourges afflicting humanity today. The others are (not necessarily in that order): Nuclear weapons and their proliferation; environmental deterioration of the planet owing to pollution and over-exploitation; humiliating and offending the human dignity of the poor and powerless; and the various forms of violence, and their terrible consequences: wars, civil wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing, emigration and the refugee problem; and, last but certainly not least, international terrorism. All these scourges are, of course, to a lesser or greater extent, linked, and they should be tackled together. The same goes to efforts to deal with them. |
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 We can thank moronic editors, who know the hotsie-totsiest places to eat but not the important things of life that ought to go into their publications, for list journalism. To call this genre low-grade filler is to overpraise it. But there are exceptions, and the most valuable is the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the United States. The Forbes 400, present and past, constitutes the largest and most reliable trove of data on who owns how much of America. The government does not collect information on wealth, only on income, so the annual Forbes effort is unique. I have been told by IRS people off the record that they have found the 400 a useful tool. The list is also a useful tool for anyone interested in power, the most important of the blessings great wealth confers. How much money, how much power? These 400 possess an aggregate $1.25 trillion. Imagine how many Congressmen that will buy. |
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 Millionaires are so last millennium. The new Forbes 400 list of richest Americans is billionaires only. If you're net worth is a mere $999 million, forget it. A billion means a thousand million, and that's the Forbes 400 minimum -- up from $900 million in 2005. Donald Trump and two of his kids grace the Forbes 400 cover, but ranked No. 94 with $2.9 billion, Trump's a long way from No. 1 Bill Gates with $53 billion. The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans is a record-breaking $1.25 trillion. That's about the same amount of combined wealth held by the 57 million households who make up half the U.S. population. The economy is booming for billionaires. It's a bust for many other Americans. |
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 While it is normal to expect high levels of hunger and poverty in a developing country, it may come as a surprise to observe a similar epidemic in one of the richest countries in the world. The Food Bank for New York City recently reported that nearly 20 percent of children in the city rely on free food to survive. According to statistics from Bread for the World, 13 million children went to bed hungry in the United States in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available. There's a debate about the real extent of U.S. hunger. The direst statistics, like those above, come (it is claimed) from advocacy groups. Others claim that "the poor here aren't really poor." Another claim is that the numbers are inflated or somehow "aren't that big," given the hugeness of the whole country. We are about to crest the 300 million mark in total population, and 13 million doesn't "sound so big" up against that. Divide 13 million by 50 states and you get about 65,000 hungry kids per state. That isn't so much - is it? Still others say that "the numbers are skewed by how bad the big cities are," as if somehow we shouldn't count the situation in, say, New York, when we look at the entire country's children. If you manhandle the numbers, you can make the problem sound smaller. |
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