Juergen just returned from India today. He had a hard time with the extreme contrast between the rich and the poor. He would eat lunch at a 5 star hotel, then outside the gates of the hotel were buildings that looked like they were bombed. People were everywhere. The streets were as bad as those he had seen in Africa. India is not a poor country. India is the 4TH richest country in the world. It has more wealth then Germany. How could so few people live like kings, while the rest of the population sleep on streets? I wrote a few posts back about the cost of rice. The cost of food will bring allot of instability to this world. We should be feeding people with our wheat, not using that wheat for bio fuel. I know it's very fashionable to care about the environment, but I think it's more important to feed children then cars!!! Here are some facts about hunger...
854 million people across the world are hungry, up from 852 million a year ago.
Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes--one child every five seconds.
In essence, hunger is the most extreme form of poverty, where individuals or families cannot afford to meet their most basic need for food.
Hunger manifests itself in many ways other than starvation and famine. Most poor people who battle hunger deal with chronic undernourishment and vitamin or mineral deficiencies, which result in stunted growth, weakness and heightened susceptibility to illness.
Countries in which a large portion of the population battles hunger daily are usually poor and often lack the social safety nets we enjoy, such as soup kitchens, food stamps, and job training programs. When a family that lives in a poor country cannot grow enough food or earn enough money to buy food, there is nowhere to turn for help.
Poverty is probably the single greatest reason parents abandon their children. If they had the resources to feed and educate their children they would keep them. I hate poverty, and I see a tidal wave of need about to hit this world. We need to be aware of the need. We all need to care about the cost of rice!
Here is a CNN story about Hunger
