HUNGER AT A HIGH PEAK
Until recently, world hunger wasn’t declared since 2014. Today an unprecedented food crisis is engulfing the world. The number of people with worsening hunger has more than doubled. More than 800 million people go to bed with empty stomachs. In every 20,000 adults and children under the age of 5, 3 die of hunger every day, about 3 people in 10 are malnourished, and 2 in 7 households face utmost food shortages. With the world’s population being over 7 billion all over, and the earth capable of growing more than enough food, there are still millions of hungry and malnourished people. It is so very easy for one to see every detail of their bones. They don’t have the energy to talk or even walk. Every day they yearn for the miracle of seeing food on the plate.
BUT WHAT CAUSES SEVERE HUNGER?
Various events including conflicts, poverty, poor agricultural infrastructure and climate change can be looked at.
Conflicts are pioneers of hunger; Approximately, 65% of people facing hunger are in countries going through active conflicts most of which are caused by dictatorship, poor governance, food and water scarcity or the resources needed to produce them. Conflicts bring about violence and insecurity that puts civilians in extreme danger whereas making it difficult and unsafe for humanitarians to assess the gravity of the food crisis and to reach communities in need of support. Sometimes these conflicts take place in different countries but negatively impact the whole world. An alive example is the Russia-Ukrainian war. The war between the two neighbouring countries of Russia and Ukraine has escalated hunger in various parts of the world. Countries like Somalia depend heavily on food produced out of wheat. When the war broke out, Ukraine’s trade came to a standstill trapping over 25 million tonnes of wheat in the country. This led to the rise of prices for the little available wheat products outside Ukraine making it hard for poor families to afford to buy food. The number of meals served in a day was lowered from normal to little or nothing at all. In times of conflict, people leave their areas of settlement for other places and abandon their garden fields. This results in crop failure as a result of crops not having anybody to attend to them. Some leave their cattle behind or rebels and soldiers take them for food leaving their owners to starve to death.
Poverty; More than 4 billion people are unable to afford the cost of an inexpensive healthy diet. People are too poor to have all the necessary meals per day. Pregnant mothers carry their babies in their stomachs without getting the required nutrients for the baby’s to receive. The limited nutrients they get are shared with their babies inside the wombs and this results in producing malnourished babies. The babies produced can have slow developments or stunted growth which eventually leads to poor performance in school, low levels of literacy and reduced probabilities of economic progress for a better life. The cycle sometimes continues in such a blood lineage and makes it impossible for one to get out of the poverty trap and the hunger crisis.
Climate change with its calamitous effects of flooding, intense drought, landslides etc disrupts crop growth by destroying gardens. Climate change makes weather patterns so unpredictable making it hard for farmers to plan for a successful harvest. Wheat and corn production has decreased in the current years due to bad weather conditions, plant diseases and the global water crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 80% of the factors for the unpredictable cereal crop harvest in the Sahel region of Africa are connected to climate change. In Bangladesh, the rise of sea levels is a serious threat to food security. Rice crops are destroyed by saltwater which often floods their coastal farmlands leaving the country at a high risk of hunger.
Poor agriculture infrastructure; Majority of the people on the brink of hunger around the world are staying in rural areas and depend on agricultural activities for survival. They often fail to get access to basic services such as irrigation provision and energy resources due to a lack of proper infrastructure. Farming becomes difficult, especially for those in dry areas.
Gender discrimination; In various parts of the world, women in rural areas play the biggest part in agricultural activities. Throughout the world, they have fewer resources and face economic hardships than men. In African rural areas, women carry the biggest responsibilities of feeding their families and yet they are denied ownership or access to land by their men counterparts. This makes it hard for them to fully engage in agricultural activities like digging, planting and harvesting. The few who get the chance to fully utilize the land for agricultural purposes sometimes lose the morale of farming after their husbands sell off their crops at the end of the harvest season and don’t share a single penny with them. This lowers agricultural activities and eventually leads to hunger.
OUTCOMES OF HUNGER
Hunger affects the brains of people in various ways. Due to a lack of necessary nutrients like proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates and minerals, extreme and continuous hunger can halt the brain from developing cognitively, emotionally and socially. All these can affect a person’s ability to focus, speak well and memorize. In children, studying and learning becomes difficult making them lack the proper education to survive in this competitive world. For instance, in countries with severe famine, children that experience hunger at very young ages struggle in academics and have lower IQs when compared to the academic performance of well-fed children.
School dropout increases; Where hunger is at its highest peak, many children tend to drop out of school. They can’t attend class when they’re hungry all the time. In Somalia, about 5 million children between 5 -17 are out of school. If the parents cannot afford to buy food then they also can’t afford to send their children to school where there is no hope of feeding them. Teachers too have no better way of motivating parents to send their children to school because they are also in the same circle of hunger. Unfortunately, children mainly girls that drop out don’t get a chance of stepping back in class but instead get married off forcefully to men who are too old to be their husbands.
Rise of the refugee camps and their associated problems; Civilians leave their places of settlement to refugee camps in search of better lives and with hopes of getting food but sometimes the situations that they find there are even worse than the ones they leave behind. Nearly 2.95 million people in Somalia were displaced and crowded in refugee camps due to hunger. Because they are too many, not all of them get a chance of getting shelter and water at the camps. Some Refugee camps around the world are not safe for women because they are sexually abused. Poor sanitation in refugee camps causes diseases like cholera that claim the lives of various people. Some face trauma because they are socially discriminated against and seen as burdens by the people that host them in refugee camps.
People lose their lives; hunger can never leave the population of a country it hits the same. In times of hunger many people mainly children become malnourished and their chances of survival become less. Every day about 25,000 people with more than 10,000 children inclusive die from hunger and its related causes. Above 800 million people are undernourished. Mothers lose their babies, babies lose their mothers, wives lose their husbands and husbands lose their wives leaving everyone in anxiety for longer periods.
Conflicts after conflicts; Hunger creates more conflicts among people and their governments. People facing hunger are forced to move from their areas of settlement to other places with the hopes of getting food. Sometimes they move to communities that have lesser resources. On reaching there, many don’t happily welcome them but instead push or start-up conflicts in fear of losing their land to the new squatters. They consider them to be land grabbers. Where hunger is caused by natural factors like climate change effects, civilians pressurize their governments and strike blaming them for causing the hunger crisis.
WHAT SSEBOWA IS DOING
The Ssebowa search engine is working tirelessly to provide life-saving support to people in most need of help. Through the invention of a search engine that aims at connecting technology to humanity, one of Ssebowa’s major aims is to play role in feeding the hungry. With Ssebowa a search engine, your searches are life-saving because by selecting it as a choice you give a meal to a starving child somewhere in the world.
Through navigating via Ssebowa, emergency meals and nutritious foods are provided to hungry people.
We supply organic fertilizers to farmers so that they can plant and get good harvests that could help to fight against hunger.
We work hand in hand with local communities to plant more trees that are beneficial in fighting the effects of climate change that are sometimes accountable for hunger outbreaks.
We give people access to clean and safe water through water trucking, putting in place water storage points and rehabilitating boreholes in rural areas.
We help and encourage people to build granaries or stores where they can keep excess food that could be consumed in times of hunger.
Through our talks and community sensitization programs, we call upon men to work hand in hand with their wives in the agricultural sector so that their togetherness and hard work can somehow solve the hunger crisis
You could also be part of the race of fighting hunger by making use of the Ssebowa search engine for your daily searches. Whenever you use Ssebowa.org, ad revenue increases the profits that are 100% used in serving humanity and nature.
