THE HUNGER GAMES
Last week I spent four days at a camp for kids in elementary. Surprisingly, one of the students’ favorite parts about the camp was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They loved picking a seat right next to their best friends while trading the food they liked and didn’t like. They also enjoyed dipping their chips in the Kool-Aid and loading up their brownies with salt. They had no clue as to how lucky and privileged they were not only to have food but to have food to waste.
As we are all aware of there are many who do not have that privilege. In third world countries to the wealthiest countries there is this forever growing problem known as hunger and it is caused by various circumstances; the number one being poverty.
What people might not realize about poverty is that it's a trap, like a maze it is almost impossible to get out of. If one doesn’t have a job or any form of income they slip into poverty and are unable to provide the basic needs for themselves and their families. Starvation takes a huge toll on the body weakening that individual mentally and physically. When that type of negative transformation begins to happen it becomes harder for this person to find a job and or work because of their deplorable state. With that being said, hunger and poverty could be considered a vicious cycle that takes a huge breakthrough to be released from.
Secondly, some of the poorer countries lack the resources needed to keep their food refrigerated and fresh. They lack the tools to maintain healthy water and the roads to be able to transfer resources to one part of the country to the next. As a result some of the children predominantly girls are forced to cut school to tote water. Natural disasters also play a huge role in hunger. When there isn’t a persistent amount of rain it becomes difficult to farm and produce food from the soil. When calamities such as floods and droughts occur it is devastating for these countries that do not have the wealth to bounce back from such disasters so their people are left to suffer.
If you could believe one of the greatest assets of war is hunger. After years of war in Liberia one man said that he knew the war was over because he saw the farm animals return to the land. When the chaos began rebels would come in and kill the animals off so the people of Liberia were left to starve. This shows how other governments use hunger as a weapon to gain the upper hand in society. It is a cruel punishment to let another starve to gain political favor, but this is how the world functions.
The Earth produces enough food to care for all us. NO ONE SHOULD BE STARVING. The Huffington Post reported that there are 100 billionaires in India. They gave the imagery of huge luxury skyscrapers in India with citizens starving outside of them. The enemy of hunger is greed. The Pontiac Tribune stated that 37% of Bill Gates’ wealth could stop world hunger, which means that if the billionaires of society took a portion of their money and invested in some of these starving areas world hunger could be no more. I believe that the rich underestimate the power they posses. I believe that we underestimate how greedy we are as human beings. I believe that hunger is a result of self-centeredness, blindness and denial.
References____________________________________________________________________
Berg, Joel. “It’s About Power, Not Food: The True Causes of World Hunger.” Huffington Post,
27 May 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-berg/the-true-causes-of-world- hunger_b_7345204.html.
November 2013, 5. UN World Food Programme. https://www.wfp.org/stories/what-causes-
hunger. Accessed 31 July 2017.
“What Causes Hunger.” Bread for the World, 5 Feb. 2015, http://www.bread.org/what-causes-
hunger.
Stoltz, Elizabeth. “Top 5 Causes of Hunger.” Global Concerns Classroom, 21 Oct. 2011,
http://gcc.concernusa.org/hunger/top-5-causes-of-hunger/.
