Entry #5: "Hunger is a result of Poverty" 6/09/2011

Poverty is just one of the main problems in our society today especially in developing countries. I think that the increase in population is one of the causes of poverty. When the population increases the resources in the country becomes less to feed the excess amount of people. Poverty is a problem that can be fixed if we all work together. It may also even be controlled if society came to the realization that increasing their family and not having the money or space for it is a big contribution, we should be careful about our family plans. Poverty is only getting worst and if we don’t do something about it, our country will continue to get worse over the years.

My transition to my paper:

Poverty is often over looked or missed in correlation to hunger. Hunger is a result of poverty. Producing more food is often sought as the more common and humane idea amongst many individuals to be able to solve world hunger. According to Josette Sheeran (2010) in her article, How to End Hunger, “food consumes up to 70 cents of every dollar earned.” People are starving not due to lack of accessibility of food, but because people simply cannot afford to buy food. While providing solutions to hunger using more efficient food production seems to be a noble endeavor, other problems lie in distribution, natural disasters, land ownership, recessions, inefficient use of land, and politics. Undertaking hunger directly by supplying additional generous contributions of food, or even finding ways to increase production, is only tackling the outer signs of poverty, not the core foundation. That is not to say that research to increasing food production should not be done, just that it should be recognized that the deeper problem of fighting the roots of poverty that causes hunger would allow better use of resources in the long term. Normal Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, stated that, “Increasing food production, while necessary, is not sufficient alone to achieve food security . . . tens of millions need more food but do not have the purchasing power to buy it” (Sheeran, 2010). Resolving world hunger by only increasing food production and not dealing with core causes of hunger such as poverty will not ease the circumstances that created poverty in the first place. Poorer counties need to be taught how to produce their own food so that they can reduce their reliance upon other counties to decrease starvation in their country.