Week 5: Nutrition, Food Security and Global Health

I remember in college I became extremely frustrated when I asked people why there had not yet been a solution to people starving in the world (individuals who I thought might have intelligent insight into the problem), and many of the responses I would get would be that it was not our problem. Complete apathy, which just baffled me. Many of them felt that the problem was too big and that it was too far displaced from America for it to really be something that we as a country should be focused on solving. I feel that one quote given in this lecture really articulated my frustration with the fact that in a world that is as technologically rich as it is, there are still people dying of hunger. It stated: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist (Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil)." I think that Dr. Shahi made a good point when he asked "if undernutrition is an underlying cause of 53% of deaths among children under five years of age, why are we not focusing on this issue." We know which parts of the world are affected most by hunger, so we need to focus our resources on eliminating this problem. The fact that women's education and status can play such a huge role in reducing child malnutrition is something that the WHO and other organizations need to focus more on. I think that perhaps these public health organizations should try to gain support from internationally famous people, such as Oprah, to help champion this cause (as someone in class pointed out, didn't Oprah just open schools for women in Africa recently?). One can look to the awareness of the global problem of AIDS that has been generated in the past decade and the fact that it has a lot to do with famous people taking an interest to convince the public of its importance. Hunger, like so many of the other issues we have discussed in class, is completely preventable. It is just an issue of coming up with an innovative solution and convincing the people who have the resources to do something about it that this issue is worth their time. I think one interesting solution Dr. Shahi proposed in class was to make it possible for farmers in developing countries to have web-based access to directly sell their produce to buyers, rather then losing most or all of the profit to the dealers in between. I also found the presentation about Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food a really interesting, and in my opinion good, solution. I think that any step towards preventing hunger is a good one, regardless of whether it is only temporary or not.