Help this food story have a happy ending
The world food story should have a happy ending by now. We should not have to tell you that every five seconds a child dies of hunger related causes. Famine, want and acute hunger were all meant to be history.
The United Nation’s visionary Millennium Development Goals are 11 years old. The top goal was to halve those in hunger and extreme poverty by 2015. After a great start this success story stalled and reversed. Behind this change lies economic chaos, globalisation, climate change, overpopulation, war and land grabs in undeveloped nations.
For the world’s starving the last few years have been harrowing. Food riots, wars and mass migration are just some of the signs of this tragic trip backwards. It’s the same forces behind the soaring cost to fill your supermarket trolley each week. The World Bank estimates the global recession alone pushed another 100 to 150 million people below the poverty line.
One in seven people still do not get enough to eat each day. Our partners, the breadfortheworld group, say that 16,000 children die of hunger related causes every day. One every five seconds. It does not have to be like this.
After the Christchurch earthquakes we saw how people came together to make sure the city did not hunger. We believe our mission is to share that spirit in the wider world.
Christian World Service, with your support, can offer real solutions to hunger.We help rural people grow better food, naturally, organically and without costly additions to their soil. We plant seeds of reality, hope and dignity.
We are all needed now more than ever. This Christmas help us write that story where, in the end, hunger is history.
Good food is good development
Growing good food is good development. It is especially good development when you do it with local people,having listened and learned from them.
It’s the sort of good development Christian World Service has done for years, a strongly Kiwi way of getting beside the poor and the powerless. We hear what they say they need and then help make it happen. Community first is a simple idea that the rest of the world adopted formally at the Busan conference this year.
It was a trail blazed by us, you, our supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand, where we have learned to listen to othervoices as part of our way of life. It is why our voice is heard with respect in the global village. Good development through good ethics grows good food, both physical and spiritual. It is our uniquely Kiwi way.
Did you know?
- Almost one billion of the 6.93 billion people in the world face chronic hunger – and this doesn’t count people who face hunger in “short-term” situations due to war or natural disasters.
- We already produce enough food calories for 12 billion people.
- Two billion people worldwide have severe problems with obesity.
- People in developed countries consume on average over 60 per cent more than they need.
- Worldwide, 40 per cent of the food produced is wasted before it can be consumed.
- 700 children die every hour as a result of hunger.
- We are using valuable crop land for agrofuel production.
- About one-third of world crop production is used to feed animals.
- Family farmers – who tend to use more sustainable farming practices – are losing their land and livelihoods. The higher food prices don’t mean they earn much more, whereas others who have the investment capital and technology can take advantage of the opportunity.
- Large corporations are taking over more of the food system, often diverting profits and benefits away from local communities and using production methods that deplete resources in the long term.
- Food, and land, are increasingly being seen as tradable commodities, with their value set by foreign investors interested in profit, not food to feed hungry people.
