Well, it is now Day 15 of 21 Days for World Hunger, and I am switching my focus from Latin American and the Caribbean to the millions of hungry people in Asia.In just one week I will be able to enjoy the sustenance needed to properly fuel my body. On day 21 I will stop mimicking the diet of the world’s hungry. Ironically, I seem to be losing interest in food. And yet, about midday I made myself a cooked plantain not because I felt like eating but because I cannot fathom wasting any perishables. I bought some last week, and they’ve been sitting on the counter ever since. Given that I’ve been essentially working two full time jobs between my real work and writing this series, I’m sure my brain benefited from the midday nutrients.
I put the plantain in a pan with no oil. It was just okay. I’m not a big fan of the banana family. Of course I burned it which might have been a contributor to my mediocre satisfaction. There’s an on-going joke in our little family. Whenever there’s smoke in the kitchen- especially when the smoke detector goes off- my husband bellows dinner’s ready! I burn nearly everything I cook. Partly because I like the taste of well-done food and mostly because I’m not skilled in the kitchen. This is okay, because the general rule in our home is that I stay out of the kitchen and my husband stays out of the yard. Last year about this same time, I spent the day trying to dig a hedge out of the ground. About eight hours into the project, the husband came out and offered his help. By this time, I was covered in sweat and could barely hold the pickax. Within four swings he busted our water main. We were running around the house looking to see where it turns off . However, being new homeowners we had no idea. I’m yelping Make it stop! Make it stop! Water is gushing out and slowly turning an already tiny yard into a small pond.
With the help of our neighbors, we found the water main and turned it off. Because it was Easter weekend, the plumbing bill totaled $400.00. I told him, the next time you want to help out in the yard, just write me a check for 400 bucks and we’ll call it even. Ah yes. We can laugh about it now.
I made a quick trip to the post office this morning. Standing outside was a disheveled, sickly looking man with a Vietnam Veterans cap holding a tattered piece of cardboard with the words VET – Need Help scrawled on it.
Usually I have food on me, being a former grazer n’all. I freely hand out apples, nuts and Clif Bars to panhandlers. Today, obviously, I had no food on or in my person. I handed him some cash and said, Use this for food. He sincerely peered through worn eyes and responded Thank you thank you. I will. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t do drugs. Thank you.
Who knows? Maybe he was telling the truth. I remain sceptical and while I don’t want to contribute to anyone’s addictions, Iwould rather err on the side of trusting. Trusting that he will buy food or that if he buys alcohol, then satisfying the need to temporarily escape a dismal life or to numb his dejected woes is the best he can do at that moment. This incident is a prime example of easing a symptom without getting anywhere near solving the problem: giving cash instead of taking action to help him help himself. I guess we all do the best we can at any given moment..
Even though I’m starting a segment on Asia today, we still ate corn tortillas, beans and rice for dinner– leftovers. I added kale not only for its amazing nutrients but because I reeeeally like it. Had anyone asked me not even ten years ago what I thought about kale, my response would’ve been blech. Taste buds really do change!
Today’s Nutritional Intake – weighing in at 113.5 the same as yesterday
| Day 15 | |||||||||
| Food | amount | calories | fat | carbs | fiber | protein | sodium (mg) | sugars | K |
| Chai Tea | 12 oz | 192 | 4.25 | 30.5 | 0.75 | 0.75 | 65 | 25.5 | 0 |
| Plantain | 1 cup | 179 | 0 | 48 | 4 | 1 | 8 | 22 | 860 |
| Corn Tortilla | 2 | 220 | 3 | 42 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 0 | |
| Kale | 1.5 cups | 54 | 1.5 | 10.5 | 4.5 | 3 | 45 | 3 | 264 |
| Olive Oil | 1 Tbsp | 120 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Rice | 1 cup | 170 | 2 | 38 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 200 |
| Black beans and pinto beans | 1 cup cooked | 236 | 1 | 43 | 15 | 15 | 205 | 1.5 | 600 |
| Tofutti sour cream | 1 Tbsp | 42.5 | 2.5 | 4.5 | 0 | 0.5 | 80 | 1 | |
| Tomato | 1 med | 24 | 0 | 6 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 7.5 | 3 | 290 |
| TOTAL | 1237.5 | 28.25 | 222.5 | 33.75 | 31.75 | 410.5 | 56 | 2214 |
Vandana Shiva on the Global Food Crisis
Vandana Shiva, an economist and activist in Delhi claims the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are contributors to the global food crisis. According to Shiva, under structural adjustment for debt relief and over the course of decades, they forced countries to give up their food stocks and to become dependent on international markets. Shiva claims we need ecological farming to turn this problem around, and that organic farming can actually serve the world better than non-organic agriculture. Vandana wants the World Bank and IMF to right their wrongs.
Today my efforts turn to the 642 million undernourished people living in Asia and the Pacific. While I feel concerned about only giving these regions three days in this series, two factors have led up to that end result:
1) Poor planning
2) I have reached out to various people whose knowledge is focused on different regions of the world. I had the most enthusiastic response from those who work with Africa, a very good response from those who work in Latin America, the Caribbean and the U.S., and no response from those who work in Asia.
Really, 21 days is not enough time to give justice to all the starving people in the world. I’m barely scratching the surface of this problem so wrought in (more like rotten) layers of politics, greed, desperation and anguish. Given what I’ve discovered, a year of researching and blogging may help, yet still not suffice.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) claims almost the entire population of the world’s undernourished live in developing countries. In Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 642 million people are suffering from chronic hunger.
According to Hunger Notes, geographically, more than 70 percent of malnourished children live in Asia, 26 percent in Africa and 4 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries (LIFDC) - List for 2010
The LIFDC list is determined by an utterly confusing three criteria (see for yourself) that I interpret to be:
1) Income criterion: The country must have a per capita (assuming this is annual) income below a historical ceiling of per capita income determined by the World Bank as $1,735 U.S.
2) Food-deficit criterion: A country’s net (gross imports minus gross exports) food trade position. Supposedly this is an average over the preceding three years for which statistics are available for that particular country. This seems more about trade volumes related to total aggregated calorie content of a country’s net food trade on basic foods such as cereals, root and tubers, tree crop oils and meat products.
I cannot seem to find more comprehensible information on this criterion. I’m most curious to know what exactly the net food trade position is supposed to be in terms of number of calories and dollar amounts.
3) Countries can self-exclude from this list when they meet the above two criteria showing a persistence of position in the fourth year, after confirming a sustained improvement in its position for three consecutive years.
The following Asian and Pacific countries are included in FAO’s Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries (LIFDC) list for 2010:
| Asia |
| Afghanistan |
| Armenia |
| Azerbaijan |
| Bangladesh |
| Bhutan |
| Cambodia |
| China |
| Democratic People’s Republic of Korea |
| Georgia |
| India |
| Indonesia |
| Iraq |
| Kyrgyzstan |
| Lao People’s Democratic Republic |
| Mongolia |
| Nepal |
| Pakistan |
| Philippines |
| Sri Lanka |
| Syrian Arab Republic |
| Tajikistan |
| Timor-Leste |
| Turkmenistan |
| Uzbekistan |
| Yemen |
| Oceania |
| Kiribati |
| Papua New Guinea |
| Solomon Islands |
| Tuvalu |
| Vanuatu |
See For Yourself
If you are a more visually minded person, you can see a lot of what I described in the table in an amazing map. The FAO has a nifty interactive hunger map in which you can click on the country and learn the hunger statistics of that country. The most recent stats appear to be from 2006, so they are slightly dated.
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) offers another useful interactive map for The Global Hunger Index (GHI). Drag the marker to any country and click to see the severity of hunger in that country.
The 2009 Global Hunger Index (GHI) ranks 84 developing and transitional countries using three equally-weighted indicators and combines them into one score. The three indicators are:
- the proportion of population who are calorie deficient
- the prevalence of childhood malnutrition for children under the age of five
- the prevalence of childhood mortality for children under the age of five
The index uses a 100 point scale with 0 (zero) meaning no hunger (the best rank) and 100 meaning severe hunger – labeled extremely alarming. As you can probably guess, the higher the rank, the worse-off the country.
A report entitled 2009 Global Hunger Index The Challenge of Hunger: Focus on Financial Crisis and Gender Inequality, which was a joint effort between Concern Worldwide, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and German NGO Welthungerhilfe, shows the 2009 GHI and outlines how South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the most alarming GHI ranks.
The highest regional GHI scores relate to South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but the causes of food insecurity in the two regions are different. In South Asia, the low nutritional, educational, and social status of women contributes to a high prevalence of underweight children under five. In contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa, low government effectiveness, conflict, political instability, and high rates of HIV and AIDS lead to high child mortality and a high proportion of people who cannot meet their calorie requirements.
This list below, taken from the 2009 Global Hunger Index, shows all the Asian and Pacific countries (bold) and a sampling of other countries along with their corresponding rankings. Keep in mind the list has a total of 84 countries, and the higher numbers reflect a more severe hunger situation.
Some countries with severe hunger, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, are not included in the GHI because sufficient data is not available to calculate their scores. The GHI used data from 2002 – 2007 and doesn’t necessarily reflect the most recent global financial crisis.
*Indicates that the underlying data are unreliable.
Rank/Country 2009
- 1 Syrian Arab Republic
- 2 Trinidad and Tobago
- 5 China
- 22 Thailand
- 29 Vietnam
- 32 Guatemala
- 33 Mongolia
- 34 Philippines
- 35 Sri Lanka
- 38 Indonesia
- 38 Uganda
- 46 North Korea*
- 48 Malawi
- 51 Lao PDR
- 53 Myanmar*
- 53 Sudan*
- 55 Nepal
- 56 Kenya
- 57 Burkina Faso
- 58 Pakistan
- 61 Cambodia
- 65 India
- 67 Bangladesh
- 68 Mozambique
- 70 Rwanda
- 70 Timor-Leste
- 74 Yemen, Rep.
- 75 Central African Republic
- 76 Haiti
- 77 Madagascar
- 78 Niger
- 79 Ethiopia
- 80 Chad
- 81 Sierra Leone
- 82 Eritrea
- 83 Burundi
- 84 Congo, Dem. Rep.
Country Trends According to IFPRI
- Of the ten countries that have seen percentage increases in their GHI scores since 1990, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has made the least progress in reducing hunger, followed by Burundi, the Comoros, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, North Korea, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Swaziland.
- The Syrian Arab Republic has the best score (lowest level of hunger) on the 2009 GHI, followed by Trinidad and Tobago, Paraguay, Suriname, and China.
- More than 40 percent of children are underweight in Timor-Leste, India, Yemen, and Bangladesh.
Why is it that a child’s death amounts to a tragedy, but the death of millions is merely a statistic?
- Patrick McDonald, Founder, Viva Network
To support the organizations I write about in the series, purchase a World Hunger: Be the Solution Tee. Proceeds from the shirt will go to the Small Planet Institute Fund and the International Fund for Africa. All tees are sweat free and available in organic cotton. To see the selection of World Hunger tees at Conducive’s Humanitarian & Human Rights Tee store, click here
To follow this series from the beginning, you can click the links below:
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 1
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 2
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 3
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 4
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 5
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 6
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 7
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 8
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 9
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 10
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 11
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 13
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 14
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 16
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 17
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 18
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 19
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 20
21 Days for World Hunger: Day 21
Solutions for World Hunger: Part I
Solutions for World Hunger: Part II
Solutions for World Hunger: Part III
Kenda, originally from Pennsylvania, is now a self-proclaimed Santa Crustacean residing joyfully in Santa Cruz, California. Her undergraduate studies in Organizational Communication were at Penn State, and she received a Masters in Art Therapy Psychology at Notre Dame in Belmont, Ca.
Kenda spent ten years providing art therapy to high risk children – mostly children dealing with loss and grief issues. For the past eleven years, she has worked independently with diverse organizations as a staff and management development consultant and facilitator. Her blog Xtreme Customer Service www.xtremecustomerservice.blogspot.com focuses on solutions to interpersonal issues.
As the daughter of a former District Forrester, she learned at an early age the importance of conserving natural resources and caring for the earth. She plans to publish her first earth-friendly children’s book March 2011.
Kenda describes herself as vegan, an ever-evolving normal neurotic, a gardener, a painter, writer and photographer, a dog-lover, incredibly fortunate to have such a fantabulous husband and adorable step-daughter, and one who whole-heartedly appreciates wildlife and the awe-inspiring natural beauty provided by our earth.
