July 26, 2020. Sheltering at Home Week 20
I was on my way to what I hoped would be a fun shopping expedition the other day — a visit to a plant nursery — when I tuned my car radio in to NPR and heard some disturbing news.
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the world was about to experience a second pandemic — a world hunger pandemic.
A spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Program was being interviewed, and the facts were dire.
I had been hoping to stock up on snapdragons or pansies that day — something to fill in that bare dirt patch in our front yard, and brighten up the view from the house where Jon and I have been confined since March.
Millions Are Now Closer to Starvation
But now I was being reminded that millions of people around the world have been getting ever closer to starvation in recent months — even as Jon and I have been fretting over whether our next food drop would include the right kind of popping corn.
The nursery shopping trip was a bust. Back home I went on line to find out whether I’d heard the NPR interview correctly. I quickly found some alarming, pre-COVID-19 figures from the World Food Project.
- Number of hungry people in the world in 2018: 822 million (or 1 in 9 people).
- In Asia: 513.9 million.
- In Africa: 256.1 million.
- In Latin America and the Caribbean: 42.5 million
- Babies born with low birth weight: 20.5 million (one in seven)
- Children under 5 affected by stunting (low height-for-age): 148.9 million (21.9%)
- Children under 5 affected by wasting (low weight-for-height): 49.5 million (7.3%)
Those figures are from 2018. And now, in 2020, the WFP is sounding a new alarm. Its director, David Beasley, warned the UN Security Council in April that, for dozens of countries, not just hunger, but full-blown famine is “a very real and dangerous possibility.”
The coronavirus is making things worse, far worse, for people around the world, he said. Because of the pandemic, an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.
A Sunday School Lesson That Stuck
When I think of world hunger, I think of a conversation I had with my father one Sunday long ago. That morning in Sunday school, I’d heard that there were people in other parts of the world who didn’t have enough to eat.
I asked my father why our country didn’t just send some of our money and food to the people who were starving.
My father said, “Because then nobody would have enough.”
I was just a kid. Ten years old maybe. And my father was a smart guy, a successful businessman. But I chose not to believe him.
I preferred to go with the day’s Sunday school lesson: if people somewhere were going hungry, we are obliged to do something about it.
These days I’m also skeptical of my father’s zero-sum approach to the economics of the situation. It is possible, after all, to grow more food and make more stuff. Not easy. But possible.
I’m Not Mother Teresa
People around the world are suffering. I see that. And I see that, unlike Mother Teresa, I am not packing my bags and rushing off to help. That bare dirt spot in my garden is taking up more real estate in my brain than world hunger, homelessness and disruption.
Why is that?
It’s partly because the people in need live on the other side of the world, and it’s easy to put them out of mind. (OK, some live on the other side of town.)
But it’s mostly because this little light of mine is so darned little.
Yes. I can write some checks to charities. I can pass these alarming facts along to you. I can write my congresswoman. But that’s about it. On my own, I’m a drop in the bucket.
Leadership Anyone?
The situation needs some big lights shone upon it. The world needs leadership, expansive leadership. Men and women with ideas and backbones. People like my Sunday school teacher who have faith — some prefer to think of it as optimism — that human beings, including adversaries, can cooperate and make things better.
It needs the expertise and devotion of people like David Beasley.
It needs the countless food banks, church pantries, free dining rooms and individual volunteers now working locally.
But it also needs the continued work — and the years of accumulated wisdom — of the world’s many relief organizations, public and private, national and international.
It needs the World Health Organization, from which Donald Trump is severing relations. It needs organizations like the WFP, of which the US is a primary donor.
It needs the Red Cross and Red Crescent. It needs the UN. It needs NATO, the EU and the UK. It needs China and Russia.
It needs the White House.
Note to Readers: I’ve reworked these last few paragraphs a bit since I first posted this essay. One reader pointed out that I’d understated the hard work of WFP and other organizations, large and small.
Thoughts on how one world leader got so smart at “Book Openers.” View a really nice garden with no bare dirt spots at “Beautifully Dead in the Dead of Winter.”
Leave a Reply