Thread: Have You Ever Gone Hungry?

I'm thinking it's a good time to learn how to have a huge garden.

http://www.thetrumpet.com/?q=8407.7115.0.0


Have You Ever Gone Hungry?

June 29, 2011 | From theTrumpet.com
A few reasons that question might get real serious, real quick.


Joel Hilliker Have you ever gone hungry? Ever had to scavenge for any scrap of food-like garbage just to stave off your gnawing hunger?

Probably not. You can’t even begin to imagine it.

But of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, an estimated 850 million are undernourished or chronically hungry. With global food production hurting and prices rising, this number is climbing swiftly. In February, the World Bank estimated that food costs had pushed 44 million more people into these unhappy ranks just since last June.

Forty-four million. Between June and February. More than 180,000 new people going hungry every day. The entire population of Huntsville, or Providence, or Tallahassee. Day after day after day. If that rate has continued, nearly 22 million more have joined them since.

When your belly is plenty full, your tendency is to brush aside such facts. After all, what can you do?

But there are several good reasons why you need to give this some serious thought—because chances are extremely high that soon, you won’t just be reading about those hunger pains.

Stop a moment and think about just how much you take plentiful food for granted. In the First World, we have enjoyed several decades of practically unprecedented abundance—limitless food variety, available year round, at some of the cheapest prices enjoyed on a mass scale in human history. Thanks to increased food production, the share of underfed people on our planet has been dropping for centuries; in recent decades—until lately, anyway—percentages of malnourished and starving people have been more than halved.

No wonder we take it all for granted. This auspicious historical anomaly is the new reality. The party can last forever, right?

Well, there is a catch. This period of plenty has largely been sponsored by a complete revolution in the way we produce and distribute what we eat. And along the way, this revolution has made us dangerously vulnerable to massive disruptions in our food supply.

As our modern world has shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial and now a service- and information-based society, farmers have vanished en masse. A century ago, one in four Americans lived on a farm, and the average farmer grew enough food to feed 12 other Americans. Today, while the nation’s population has more than tripled to over 300 million, only 2 million farmers remain. On average, each one grows food to feed 140 people.

Making food has become a profession for experts. In the First World, less than 2 percent of the population is feeding the other 98 percent. The vast majority of us get our food from hundreds or thousands of miles away, and have only about a week’s worth of groceries in the pantry. We are wholly sustained by a complex system about which we are almost completely ignorant.

Each step in this intricate process is susceptible to major potential breakdowns.

The reason this matter is increasingly becoming a concern is that signs of those breakdowns have started to appear.

This month the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said that worldwide, the cost of a typical food basket rose 48 percent from a year ago. According to the World Bank, global wheat prices have more than doubled since the second half of last year, and corn, sugar and oil costs have taken off. The G-20’s agriculture ministers met last week amid mounting evidence that these high prices are only going to get worse—along with food shortages.

“The problem is very complex,â€

Why aren't fruit trees being planted everywhere on public and private lands if hunger was a real threat?