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Step 1
Share existing food, production technology, and water and land resources with developing countries. Pressure your political leaders to pursue policies that promote global cooperation.
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Step 2
Promote economic development of developing nations to allow its residents to earn more money and afford more food.
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Step 3
Support equal rights for all people. Promoting access to health care, education and jobs for women and minorities encourages economic development for the country as a whole. Birth rates are reduced with even basic education, further reducing the strain on the food supply. See 404 Build a School in a Third World Country.
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Step 4
Lobby the U.S. government to remove agriculture subsidies. Designed to help U.S. farmers with globally traded crops like wheat and corn, subsidies depress global prices, holding down the incomes of farmers in developing countries or even driving them out of business. Poor countries can make a strong argument that the developed world is intentionally preventing the creation of a level playing field.
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Step 5
Support increased funding of global-assistance programs. The United States uses only a tiny fraction of its money (less than one-half of one percent of the gross domestic product) for overseas food assistance. The nation could easily double or triple this figure without suffering economic harm.
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Step 6
Understand the impact that meat consumption has on the world food supply. Meat production is a biologically inefficient process; the amount of meat produced is infinitely smaller than the amount of feed grain the animals consume. Eating meat elevates consumption of scarce resources and increases pressure on the world food supply. The majority of meat is consumed by developed nations.
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Step 7
Contribute to private global assistance programs such as CARE (care.org) and the International Red Cross (icrc.org). Many churches and civic organizations also conduct hunger relief programs.
Comments
Nuntius said
on 10/3/2009 Interesting article! One point I find difficult to envisage as practicable is that of sharing "water and land resources with developing countries".... "food and production technology",yes,by all means!!!!!(teach a man to fish....)
The point about government subsidy is sooooo vital!
Step(6)has importance for health as well as ecological
and economical reasons. I agree!! Nuntius
demeter said
on 10/3/2009 Another way that industrialized countries could help, and do help, third-world countries is by providing contraception, and education on its use. Just as one example, AIDS has caused massive devastation in Africa, and passing this disease on is prevented by condom use. Also, when women are empowered to have control over their own bodies, birth rates tend to go down, reducing the strain on limited resources.
mymagic123 said
on 3/1/2008 Thanks for adding "Step6", which is so often omitted when world hunger is discussed! Eating meat means making the food chain from plants to humans longer. This way of producing food by adding another “link” to the chain, i.e. animals, represents a loss of nutrients that we could use directly ourselves. Depending on the type of animal, it takes up to, and sometimes more than, 10 plant calories to deliver 1 meat calorie. If the whole of the human population allowed themselves the “luxury” of eating the amount of meat typically eaten today in the EU and in the USA it would be impossible to feed everyone in the world, and this is not the case for some point far off in the future, this is already the case, right now.
It is a real problem that development aid organisations still invest in livestock in developing countries. Raising non grazing animals like pigs and chicken is the much bigger
acopro13 said
on 1/11/2008 Like the point about meat consumption. Thanks for the article.