From Hunger to Hope

Assalamualaikum and Salam Ramadhan Al-Mubarak! How are you guys feeling about today?  Great huh.Okay, today we will continue with our previous entry.

 

World hunger is one of the serious issues through all over the world. There are many ways actually that can help ease world hunger. Recently, Justin Bieber, had done a huge contribution to the nation by visiting the victim of natural disaster.Apart from that,he had launched a song entitled "Pray" as a part of his contribution.

Let us look a little bit of the song byte :

I lose my appetite knowing kids starve tonight

Am I a sinner, 'cause my dinner is still on my plate?

Ooh I got a vision to make a difference

And it's starting today

If this little boy had the awareness of this serious problems, why don't we do the same thing too? Let's play our role now by taking part as the nation. Much of the new welcomed efforts to help small farmers in Africa and elsewhere can derail and wind up in the ditch of development disaster by convincing small farmers to buy expensive seeds, petroleum based fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides that will increase their crop yield.  The original Green Revolution did increase crop yields, but at a great cost to farmers and their communities. Many farmers could not afford to invest in these expensive high tech products and lost their land to the smaller number who had more money.  They left the land and most became poor, unemployed or very low income workers in urban slums.  The Gates Foundation knows, of course, that this is likely to happen again and says that the New Green Revolution "will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production."

 "Land mobility," is a fancy term for millions of landless people moving from the country to the slums of the nearest cities, most living in abject poverty.  The multi-national companies that make these products will do quite well in this New Green Revolution but a large portion of the farmers will not.   Displacement is only one of the bad consequences.  The environment is harmed by large doses of chemicals as are the farmers and the soil becomes depleted by over-farming.

There are certainly good intentions in the efforts of a whole new generation of development specialists. They have learned from some past mistakes and all of us in that world need to listen and learn from them.  They and their major funders should also pay attention to the many excellent studies that show that appropriate technology which is environmentally friendly and engages and respects small farmers rather than telling them what to do should be tried on a massive scale.  It has never been financed on the scale of the problem.  Where it has been tried it has succeeded.  Before spending untold billions on high tech methods that may not succeed, may be dangerous and certainly will displace millions of people, let's "invest in success" and fund methods that will not have so many unintended consequences.  That is something that our world has never tried.