Reflect on and discuss some of the underlying causes of world hunger?
Hunger is a feeling of uneasy or painful caused by want of food and I think every one of us all have the experience of feeling hungry.as we know food is one of our basic needs of human being to be able to survive, all of us depend on food to have a good health but there are 850 million people around the world go to sleep hungry every night and most of them are children who should have a good feeding, good shelter and a good care. Poor nutrition causes five million child deaths each year. I was shocked when nearly 1 billion people don’t have enough food to survive. In my optimistic expectation. I thought with the improved medical services plus the development of technology, the number of world hunger should have decreased. And we may question ourselves: does the world produce enough food to feed 7 billion people? YES absolutely, the world produces enough food to feed everyone even increased 17% more calories per person today compare to the last 30 years (FAO 2002, p.9).
So what are the underlying causes of world hunger? There are many underlying causes may lead to world hunger such as war and conflict in the past, current economic downturns combined with high foods prices, and rapid population growth. I am going to use the Sociological imagination template to reflect on this topic, we will look at all the causes from the past up to now in order to know more deeply about the topic.
Historically, in the past 60 years, wars were the main causes of hunger around the world especially in those developing countries like Viet Nam. Let me tell you about my family, how they went through the wars and how they can survive during the famine. My father grew up along with his seven siblings, in a hard-scrabble, cashless family. My grandfather was in the army, so there was only grandma take care all the kids. The “soil” in my family farm was sand and the nearby river was salty because it was so close to the coast, therefore they could not farm anything. The only free and reliable source of food for the family was yams, a little bit of purchased rice and some sea salt. That was all they had to survive. I asked my father if they ate fish or vegetables with their yams. No, he said: “when you are hungry and poor, you don’t worry about taste, you are just fell so lucky to have something in the stomach, because there were many people had died”. The impact of wars had effects to the economic and farming activities of the Vietnamese, caused the major part of the country into famine, sadly, there were between 400,000 and 2 million people had starved to death in 1945.
Not only in Viet Nam but anywhere around the world also got the negative impacts on the economic and daily life due to the wars, especially in the developing countries. The reason for that is most of people in those countries reply on farming to produce their own food and the main income for the whole family. If the wars happened, they cannot farming, no food, no income to support the family and will lead to hunger.
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