HUNGER ERADICATION WITH GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION

The FAO says that about 2 billion people do not have regular access to safe, nutritious  and sufficient food. 144 million children under five are stunted. 3 billion people cannot afford the cheapest healthy diets. Many millions of people due to starvation live everyday by not knowing whether they can make it to the next day. 

Studies shows that, the malnourished child's brain damage is irreversible after 1000 days. Their brains and bodies are stunted. And we can see brain volumes up to 40 % less for the malnourished when compared to a well nourished child. 

  

                

Economist Amartya Sen in 1998, won a Nobel prize for saying "guess what? Famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it". The reason for the hunger isn't the shortage of food it is poverty.

Studies show that  Recent estimates for global poverty are that 8.6% of the world, or 736 million people, live in extreme poverty on $1.90 or less a day, according to the World Bank.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification(UNCCD) says that 80 percent of the world population suffering from hunger and extreme poverty is from rural areas. Many of them depend on agriculture, but only have access to degraded natural resources such as land and water.

There is an idea which most world class businessmen boldly support, which is to ask the question, what if, instead of looking at hungry as victims and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food even to support their own families, What if we view them as solution, as the value chain to fight hunger. What if we use their produce to feed a hungry child elsewhere. 

In virtually every case. when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market like say we will buy this amount of food and we will pick it up and make sure that it is stored properly. This actually will increase their yields 2, 3, 4 folds. This guaranteeing plays it all. This transforms many lives.

YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING LIKE THIS IS A SMALL SCALE VILLAGE LEVEL IDEA. 

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT BRAZIL AS IT IS DEFEATING HUNGER FASTER THAN ANY NATION IN THE WORLD.

And what is special about it is , instead of investing their money in food subsides and other things they invested in school feeding programmes, and they require that 1/3  of the food comes from the smallest farmers who would have no oppurtunity. And they are doing this at large scale. In India we can do it for rations. 

And this zero hunger programme costs 0.5 percent of the GDP  and this has lifted millions of people out of poverty and hunger.