Valeriya Teplova 201360 Fall: Composition II (03) Instructor: Heidi Skurat Harris Global Food Crisis

I started to do research paper for Global Issues class, so some information and sources that I was found were useful for this paper. While my research through internet I saw a lot of pictures with this tiny children that are almost translucent. It took my breath away! I knew that we have hunger in the world, but I did not think that it that bad. Posted by wfp.org on 26 January 2009 As the global economic crisis deepens, hunger and malnutrition are likely to increase. Reduced incomes and higher unemployment mean the purchasing power of the poor diminishes. Already, more and more people are finding food is out of reach. Millions of people could face starvation if the prices of staple foods will grow at their current pace. A lot of questions were in my head. Why is famine becoming much stronger in Africa? Why cant we prevent or reduce the mortality? So this was my start of researching about global food crisis and answer on questions that relate to it. I was pulling up internet with terms like starvation in Africa, food donation , and it was a lot of information and people opinions about this problem. Of course in general people was saying that the position of hunger is critic and we need help to starving people, save their lives. But some, I cant even call them as people, were so biased, talk and write like racists. I found article on nytimes site Our Coming Food Crisis by Gary Paul Nabhan, where he talked about tiny town of Furnace Creek, Calif. which is situated in Death Valley. According to Gary Nabhan: It last made news in 1913, when it set the record for the worlds hottest recorded temperature, at 134 degrees. With the heat wave currently blanketing the Western states, and

given that the mercury there has already reached 130 degrees, the news media is awash in speculation that Furnace Creek could soon break its own mark. So because of weather changes the number of natural disasters in the world has doubled since the mid-1990s. In this sense, we see how human faced the climate change every day. In this piece we see how everything is connected to each other and if something went wrong, it leads to global imbalances in whole world, its affect a lot. Africa, experiencing the strongest drought in the last 60 years Africa become in the grip of famine and going through difficult days. And climate is a key element in hunger emergencies such as the one in the Horn of Africa. The article I found interesting article where was telling about Progress at Risk in the Horn of Africa. According to unicefusa.org: A year ago today, the crisis in the Horn of Africa reached a boiling point when the United Nations declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia. Eight million people across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya are still in need of humanitarian assistance. Children, in particular, are threatened by a combination of poverty, insecurity, malnutrition, and disease. The Horn of Africa's famine isn't just the weather's fault. It has three main causes: drought, high food costs, and violent political instability. They are familiar factors in almost any hunger, but that the current crisis in East Africa is so terrible, because each of its causes is an individual extreme. The strong drought in east Africa has affected the lives of more than ten million people. Thousands of families, including young barefoot children, fled from Somalia to Kenya, having overcome enormous distances on parched earth, without supplies of food and water, after their crops and livestock were lost as a result of the unprecedented drought. Because of this drought, more than ten million people in the North-East Africa suffered. About 37% of the districts in the north-eastern Kenya is suffering from hunger, and a huge number of Somali children have died as a result of malnutrition either during the journey or shortly after being

arrived in the camps for assistance to refugees. It is insane how we live on the same earth and how some countries going through hard times but we not really can help each other, so global.

Then I recognized that hungry people are angry people, and angry people bring governments down. War always has a destroying impact on the environment and, more specifically agriculture. And I found article onglica.org, according Sofie Utne: Many conflicts today take place in rural areas, where farmers are victims. For the formal varieties, the supply of seed may dry up in times of war. Transport routes could be disrupted, or pesticides and fertilizers needed to grow may be unavailable. I think that impacts on countries from war is huge. Especially if the country is big on agriculture. In Africa, we can observe a clear deficit of infrastructure. Since Africa is not so long ago was a colonial country, this is reflected in the modern economy of the region. The most developed mining and agriculture, the pace of economic growth in most countries is very low.

Are there any prospects of eradicating hunger? It is clear that propagandize decades in our life, the assertion that hunger in developing countries is the result of centuries-old exploitation, colonization and appropriation of wealth imperialism, is somewhat naive and needs a rethink. The roots of this phenomenon are too deep and have at the same time historical, economic, political and natural climatic aspects. Climate change - so big disaster, on the one hand it is a death sentence for the inhabitants of some regions to hunger and poverty, and on the other hand leads to the drying up of the vital water sources and the emergence of chaos. The first signs of the chaos that comes to mind is the unequal distribution of food, energy, water resources and surface and groundwater sources. With the worsening of the situation seemingly simple phenomenon of climate change poses a threat to world peace. The organizations who share this

opinion, and entered the UN, saying that climate change was of no small importance threat to peace and security in the world.

Global warming, which led to abnormal drought and widespread flooding could cause a worsening food crisis in the poorest regions of Africa and Asia.

Resources

1.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food2.crisis.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 3.http://www.unicefusa.org/work/emergencies/horn-of-africa/ 4.http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/466546a.html 5.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/globalfoodcrisis/ 6.http://www.wfp.org/global-food-crisis-in-depth