Yet we all know that progress is painfully slow.
The Food and Agricultural Organisation (F.A.O) of the United Nations estimates in their recent report for World Hunger Day October 3 that 840 million human beings on our earth remain chronically hungry, 799 million of them in the developing world.
The number has been decreasing by barely 2.5 million per year over the last eight years.
At that rate we will reach the millennium goal to halve the hunger in the world by 2015 one hundred years late, in 2115. If this happens, millions will die who could have been saved.
This hunger exists at a time when never before in the history of the world has so much food been produced and when we possess the technology that can substantially increase farm productivity and better water management.
The World Food Program in its latest report warns that nearly 40 million Africans are struggling daily against starvation, a scale of suffering that is unprecedented.
In some parts of Africa families exist on one meal a day of pumpkin leaves and wild vegetables. Some eventually die due to the malnutrition and its related diseases.
The malnutrition that affects 30% of the population of the world leads to illness and death as well as great loss of human potential and social development. It keeps entire societies from realising their potential.
When this hardship is multiplied by millions of families world wide, it creates a ripple effect that imperils global development. The scourges of hunger and poverty are both unacceptable and unnecessary in the world of today.
In our World today Hunger is the legacy of the lack of control of human desire. There is a lack of social and political will to change the systems that keep people hungry and poor.
Those who wish to stop the effects of hunger and famine know that they need to address social and financial inequalities, crippling debt and trading structures that are not just.
These are the challenges if hunger is ever to be eradicated! Eradicating hunger is not merely a lofty ideal.
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