Hunger Quotes

'It's been called the invisible killer, the silent emergency. It is not famine and it does not make the headlines. It is the grinding poverty which, day in day out, deprives millions of people across the globe of the essentials of a decent life. In particular, they are deprived of an adequate diet. This 'normal hunger' will kill their children in the first year, destroy their health in adulthood, and take them to an early grave...They die very quietly. They are the brothers and sisters of Alberto, who died aged six months from malnutrition and infection, because his father, a cocoa worker in Brazil, does not earn enough to buy sufficient food, let alone medicine. They are the cousins of Hassan, who died aged three months from malnutrition and TB in a hospital ward in Sudan, long after the famine had ended.'

Chris Bryer: The Hunger

'The loss of human life [due to hunger] is as great as if an atomic bomb - similar to the one that destroyed Hiroshima during the Second World War - were dropped on a densely populated area every three days'.

Womenaid Press release on Hunger - http://www.womenaid.org/press/info/food/food4.html

'Starvation is death by deprivation; the absence of of one of the essential elements of life. It's not the result of an accident or a spasm of violence, the ravages of diseases or the inevitable decay of old age. It occurs because people are forced to live in the hollow of plenty. For decades, the world has grown enough food to nourish everyone adequately. Satellites can spot budding crop failures; shortages can be avoided. In the modern world, like never before, famine is by and large preventable. When it occurs, it represents civilization's collective failure.'

'...[it is] a man-made catastrophe, caused by one anonymous decision at a time, one day at a time, by people, institutions, and governments doing what they thought was best for themselves or sometimes even what they thought at the time was best for Africa'.

R. Thurow and S. Kilman (2009) Enough: Why the Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty

'Rather than promoting food production for the domestic market, the donors were encouraging the development of so-called 'high value-added' fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and cotton for export on the best irrigated farmland' - Q for students: What high value food products from developing countries are available in your supermarket - Kenya peas/beans; American asparagus; etc. - consequences?'

'On the contrary, famines are spurred on as a result of a global oversupply of grain staples. Since the 1980s, grain markets have been deregulated under the supervision of the World Bank and US grain surpluses are used systematically as in the case of Somalia to destroy the peasantry and destabilise national food agriculture. The latter becomes, under these circumstances, far more vulnerable to the vagaries of drought'

Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa