The Hope and Dismay of Starving Syrians

“Starvation is a different level of abhorrence because it is a slow, gruesome death”. -Dr. Leah Carmichael

The Syrian Civil War seems more and more hopeless as Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and his regime gain more power over insurgents and civilians by intentionally starving them and using biological and chemical warfare. With Russian support, Assad has been able to avoid punishment for his war crimes and consequently gain more power.

The Syrian refugee crisis is probably the most notorious aspect of this ongoing war. As per UNHCR, there are 13.1 million people in need of humanitarian aid in Syria. More than five million Syrians have fled the country; however, there are still more than six million that have left their homes and are homeless within their country.

Further, the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reports that there are 6.5 million starving Syrians.

Despite Syria’s seemingly grim future, non-governmental agencies like Mercy Corps have stepped up to help in addition to governmental programs. Mercy Corps helps feed hundreds of thousands of people each month by donating flour to local bakeries and ensuring that people in need are able to get bread from the bakeries.

Nonetheless, Mercy Corps has faced some setbacks, as the Assad regime does not want it to assist starving Syrians. Dr. Leah Carmichael stated that “one of the main roles of the government is to ensure a food supply”.

Dr. Carmichael is a respected professor at the University of Georgia and a food insecurity expert. She has been researching the puzzle of Assad’s starvation war tool to determine why governments starve their people to gain power and later want their people’s support. She is also interested in the role of Mercy Corps in replenishing food for the Syrian people. The Borgen Project had the privilege of interviewing her on March 2, 2018, to gain more insight into the current situation and Mercy Corps.

“Food is really one of those things where if you’re hungry and you weren’t before, it catalyzes that kind of protest [referencing the Arab Spring, the start of the Syrian Civil War],” Carmichael stated in the interview. “Understanding that food is a major provision of welfare for a government and then understanding that the tactic of taking food away and making people hungry is either unintentionally or intentionally a way which governments lose their authority to rule”.

As for Mercy Corps shaping the outcome of the Syrian civil war, Carmichael says it is unintentional yet powerful in helping starving Syrians because “as much as you are keeping civilians alive, you are shaping the future legacy of this war as not just being one where the international community turned a blind eye as mass genocide occurred…as in this case, Mercy Corps is shaping the human side of it.”

However, Carmichael mentioned that Mercy Corps’ role is still a “drop in the bucket” in comparison to what a government could do. She said that everyday people can help this situation by determining “what active role if any should the U.S. play abroad”.

She also mentioned that a growing norm is starting to emerge in the international community called the responsibility to protect, “the idea is that pure sovereignty matters for states, but in the cases where you see sovereignty being used to promote genocide, the international community has a responsibility to step in to protect those people against their government”.

Thus, public pressure to take action could lead the U.S. to possibly intervene. However, public support is withering in terms of U.S. global intervention. As Carmichael stated in a 2017 TEDx Talk, “the abject horror of war is our indifference to it”. Doing good and helping people in need is very much “something that we as Americans like on paper.”

Suzy Hansen from the Washington Post shares a similar view in that Americans under President Trump are beginning to dislike more intervention as an “America First” ideal grows. Further, Americans are learning more about the “darker” parts of American history that have resulted from U.S. intervention, such as U.S.-backed coups. This suggests that many Americans are re-thinking the global role of the U.S., as intervention has the potential to cause more harm than good and can negatively impact relations and foreign policy.

To help starving Syrians, it seems that the international system needs to intervene, as Russian-led peace talks may only prolong suffering. However, “what to do” will prove to be a difficult and methodological decision to make.

– Mary McCarthy

Photo: Flickr

Could Jackfruit Be Key to Ending World Hunger?

It may seem crazy, but a fruit with the consistency of pulled pork, a putrid smell and a taste similar to pineapple could be one of the keys to ending world hunger. This crop, the jackfruit, can weigh up to 100 pounds and is rich in protein, potassium and vitamins.

Unfortunately, with its notorious smell, jackfruit has fallen out of favor with consumers in the nations where it most commonly grows in the wild: India and Bangladesh. In India alone, more than 75 percent of the yearly yield goes to waste.

How Is Jackfruit Ending World Hunger?

Recent cautions from the World Bank and the United Nations illustrate how inconsistent rain and soaring temperatures have already reduced wheat and corn yields, and food wars within the next decade are a possibility.

There is an upside. The crops affected most by climate change also have substantial requirements for irrigation and pesticides. The jackfruit, on the other hand, is a perennial (meaning it regrows every year on its own). While it takes up to seven years to bear fruit, which means farmers have to wait, a single tree can yield between 150 and 200 gargantuan fruits per year. It serves plenty of uses, as it can be found in soups, jams and even ice cream. People eat them fresh, dried or roasted. The wood is even rot resistant. With the fruit’s versatility and the ease with which it is cultivated, it is no surprise experts are excited about the jackfruit’s ability to aid in ending world hunger.

Who Loves Jackfruit?

There is an organization aptly called Project Jackfruit that is looking to make jackfruit as readily available as possible over the world. The project believes jackfruit’s status as a “miracle crop” is just another reason it is essential to ending world hunger. It also states that the procurement of the crop will help fight climate change, eliminate waste, feed hungry populations and provide another revenue stream for impoverished farmers in South Asia. The organization markets the fruit globally and has set up relationships with Indian farmers to scale up their production.

The Indian government has gotten on the bandwagon by launching initiatives to increase the fruit’s use in a can and as a processed food. India is fighting to destroy jackfruit’s stigma as a “poor man’s food” via marketing strategies throughout the country. It is outsourcing these projects to local universities such as the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India, which devoted two days to a conference that detailed plans to ramp up production and further market the jackfruit and its cousin, the breadfruit.

Looking Forward

Only a handful of commercial jackfruit farms are commercially viable at this point. Still, the future looks bright for the jackfruit. Governments are pushing the resilient crop in their own countries, as well as in food-insecure countries. At the University of Agricultural Sciences, a researcher referred to the fruit as a “miracle.” Combine all this effort with the rise of private investments such as Project Jackfruit, it will be no surprise if jackfruit is a primary part of the discussion behind ending world hunger.

– David Jaques

Feedie and the Lunchbox Fund Fight Childhood Hunger in South Africa

According to the Lunchbox Fund, 12 million South African children under the age of six are living below the poverty line. Unsurprisingly, this means that a fifth of households in South Africa experience continual hunger.

This has daunting consequences. Lack of adequate nutrition can cause growth stunting. In fact, 27 percent of children under the age of five have stunted growth in South Africa. In many cases this is irreversible. Malnutrition causes not only physical damage but mental deterioration as well. It negatively affects children’s learning ability and capacity to concentrate. When the top priority of a household is to fulfill hunger, and it struggles in doing so, the importance of school drops to a negligible level.

An app and a nonprofit have partnered to fight this problem and reduce childhood hunger in South Africa.

Feedie

Feedie is an app that allows food lovers to share photos of their meals on social media pages. However, this is not just any food photography app. It allows foodies to take their love of photographing food to a humanitarian level.

With the app, people can upload photos of their meals at participating restaurants, and that restaurant will donate 25 cents to the Lunchbox Fund, which provides lunches for impoverished South African schoolchildren. There are approximately 100 participating restaurants, including Del Posto, The Spotted Pig and La Esquina in New York.

The Lunchbox Fund

The Lunchbox Fund is a nonprofit that focuses on childhood hunger in South Africa. They work to provide a daily nutritious meal to orphaned and poor school children in townships and rural communities in South Africa. They believe that food insecurity should not inhibit children from achieving a basic human right: going to school.

The Lunchbox Fund has created a menu revolving around nutritious foods that children love, including maize, rice, lentils, beans, samp, gravy, soya mince, porridge, soy milk, 100 percent juice, peanut butter and vegetables. These meals have been approved by the Nutrition Information Centre at the University of Stellenbosch, ensuring that they contain adequate amounts of macronutrients and micronutrients that are essential to healthy brain and body development.

They work in all nine provinces and are dedicated to providing daily lunch meals to schoolchildren yearly. The Lunchbox Fund has calculated that 4,719,480 meals are necessary to feed vulnerable children in all provinces. They aim to reach four million children that do not receive government food subsidies at school.

Successes and Donations

The Lunchbox Fund has been feeding children since 2005. Since its birth, it has served an impressive 14.4 million meals. Just in 2017, 4.9 million meals were served. Even more astounding is that 25,000 children receive meals every day.

Schools that have nutrition programs tend to see higher academic achievement among students. Attendance and academic retention increases when children can focus and look forward to eating a fulfilling meal. Schools partnered with the Lunchbox Fund can expect to experience these trends.

Every cent that is donated goes toward fighting childhood hunger in South Africa. Impressively, if the average amount of money that Americans spend weekly on groceries ($151) were donated, it would feed three students for an entire year. This illustrates the huge impact that an inexpensive meal can have on a child’s health and education. The success of the Lunchbox Fund can serve as a model to help children at risk of hunger all over the world.

– Mary McCarthy

Photo: Flickr

Poverty Acts as A Factor in High Rates of Obesity in India

Alongside rising poverty rates, India’s population has encountered elevated cases of nutrition-related diseases. However, as a result of the fast-food proliferation movement caused by the multi-spread of fast food industries through globalization, the problem of obesity in India succeeded in outweighing its underweight and malnourishment issues due to its multiple life-threatening comorbidities.

With 270 million people reported as living below the poverty line, India was not previously seen to be at risk of obesity which was correlated with higher and more frequent access to food. Yet, the Indian lifestyle altered dramatically, from an active mode of living requiring constant strength and mobility in agricultural fields and industrial sectors to a sedentary lifestyle dependent on machines and technological innovations brought upon the country by the developed nations in the form of transnational corporations.

According to the Lancet journal in 2013, the percentage of obesity in India ranked the nation as one of the top 10 countries having the highest proportion of obese citizens. In fact, India and China together contributed to 15 percent of the world’s obesity, with a total of 46 million Chinese and 30 million Indian obese people.

New Food and Dietary Patterns

Globalization and the expansion of transnational corporations have been continuously associated as two main underlying causes of the obesity epidemic witnessed in developing countries. Foreign trade through multinational companies paved the pathway for increasing the availability of international food products and foreign brands at reduced prices.

This shift in dietary patterns and the quality of food products in the markets not only negatively affected the profit of local farmers and the country’s overall economy, but it also led to the development of a double burden of disease on the healthcare system. On the one hand, infectious and communicable diseases continue to strive and cause seasonal outbreaks; on the other, the afterthoughts of obesity including heart disease, liver damage and diabetes reflect the dangerous health impact of obesity through high incidence and prevalence rates.

Impact of Obesity in India

Dr. Anoop Misra, chairman of the National Diabetes, Obesity, and Cholesterol Foundation, highlighted obesity in India as one of the most concerning health issues for the country’s population, particularly among children. According to Misra, recent childhood obesity statistics are alarming as the intra-abdominal and truncal subcutaneous adiposity features in children tend to expose them to further lifelong comorbidities such as type II diabetes. Misra also asserted the crucial need for intervention programs in the country addressing obesity through healthy nutrition, physical activity, and stress management.

Measures for Improvement

Despite the significant impact caused by obesity on the overall development of the country, only few steps and initiatives have been taken to address the problem. Certain non-profit organizations provide resources for the youth and their parents to help them fight obesity, while medical professionals tend to recommend bariatric surgery rather than preventive treatment due to higher effectiveness and efficiency.

Future efforts in the country should be directed towards primary prevention, including educational and awareness campaigns, physical education opportunities and access to healthy/locally grown food at lower prices. Such attempts could contribute in proactively lowering the rates of obesity in India rather than relying on expensive means to fight the problem.

– Lea Sacca

Photo: Flickr

The Top 10 Most Important Current Global Issues

Among all the good in the world, and all the progress being made in global issues, there is still much more to be done. Given the overwhelming disasters that nations, including the U.S., have been or still are going through, it is important to be aware of the most pressing global issues.

Top 10 Current Global Issues

1. Climate Change
   The global temperatures are rising, and are estimated to increase from 2.6 degrees Celsius to 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. This would cause more severe weather, crises with food and resources and the spread of diseases. The reduction of greenhouse emissions and the spreading of education on the importance of going green can help make a big difference. Lobbying governments and discussing policies to reduce carbon emissions and encouraging reforestation is an effective way of making progress with climate change.
2. Pollution
   Pollution is one of the most difficult global issues to combat, as the umbrella term refers to ocean litter, pesticides and fertilizers, air, light and noise pollution. Clean water is essential for humans and animals, but more than one billion people don’t have access to clean water due to pollution from toxic substances, sewage or industrial waste. It is of the utmost importance that people all over the world begin working to minimize the various types of pollution, in order to better the health of the planet and all those living on it.
3. Violence
   Violence can be found in the social, cultural and economic aspects of the world. Whether it is conflict that has broken out in a city, hatred targeted at a certain group of people or sexual harassment occurring on the street, violence is a preventable problem that has been an issue for longer than necessary. With continued work on behalf of the governments of all nations, as well as the individual citizens, the issue can be addressed and reduced.
4. Security and Well Being
   The U.N. is a perfect example of preventing the lack of security and well being that is a serious global issue. Through its efforts with regional organizations and representatives that are skilled in security, the U.N. is working toward increasing the well being of people throughout the world.
5. Lack of Education
   More than 72 million children throughout the globe that are of the age to be in primary education are not enrolled in school. This can be attributed to inequality and marginalization as well as poverty. Fortunately, there are many organizations that work directly with the issue of education in providing the proper tools and resources to aid schools.
6. Unemployment
   Without the necessary education and skills for employment, many people, particularly 15- to 24-year olds, struggle to find jobs and create a proper living for themselves and their families. This leads to a lack of necessary resources, such as enough food, clothing, transportation and proper living conditions. Fortunately, there are organizations throughout the world teaching people in need the skills for jobs and interviewing, helping to lift people from the vicious cycle of poverty.
7. Government Corruption
   Corruption is a major cause of poverty considering how it affects the poor the most, eroding political and economic development, democracy and more. Corruption can be detrimental to the safety and well being of citizens living within the corrupted vicinity, and can cause an increase in violence and physical threats without as much regulation in the government.
8. Malnourishment & Hunger
   Currently there are 795 million people who do not have enough to eat. Long-term success to ending world hunger starts with ending poverty. With fighting poverty through proper training for employment, education and the teaching of cooking and gardening skills, people who are suffering will be more likely to get jobs, earn enough money to buy food and even learn how to make their own food to save money.
9. Substance Abuse
   The United Nations reports that, by the beginning of the 21st century, an estimated 185 million people over the age of 15 were consuming drugs globally. The drugs most commonly used are marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, amphetamine stimulants, opiates and volatile solvents. Different classes of people, both poor and rich, partake in substance abuse, and it is a persistent issue throughout the world. Petitions and projects are in progress to end the global issue of substance abuse.
10. Terrorism
    Terrorism is an issue throughout the world that causes fear and insecurity, violence and death. Across the globe, terrorists attack innocent people, often without warning. This makes civilians feel defenseless in their everyday lives. Making national security a higher priority is key in combating terrorism, as well as promoting justice in wrongdoings to illustrate the enforcement of the law and the serious punishments for terror crimes.

With so many current global issues that require immediate attention, it is easy to get discouraged. However, the amount of progress that organizations have made in combating these problems is admirable, and the world will continue to improve in the years to come. By staying active in current events, and standing up for the health and safety of all humans, everyone is able to make a difference in changing the fate of our world.

– Chloe Turner

Photo: Flickr