Hunger is no longer problem of the poor

By Won Jung-eui

One thing the nation and the world need is a better way of living together. Under the slogan of 19th century liberalism, free competition boosted the wealth of the nation and it made great progress in industrial transition from cottage industries to mass manufacturing.

However, after centuries of endless competition, now is the time to move on to the challenging issue of hunger.

If we think about hunger, most of the time we think it is merely an issue of developing countries or a problem that needs to be taken care of in the near future. But we too rarely articulate, defend and argue about the basic problem in our own society.

The thing is hunger is no longer a problem of the poor. It is the most basic need for every human being and thus it is a shame to have this problem in so-called civilized society. We desperately need to re-discover the lost art of caring one another.

During the last two years, from 2010 to 2012, around 870 million people were chronically undernourished and the number of people in hunger all over the world remains unacceptably high. Conventional approaches to the hunger problem treat individuals as if they live in isolation or are unconnected.

However, as George Kent,

a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, wrote about the issue of hunger and how it always occurs in a social context.

According to Kent, when we deal with an issue of hunger, we need to take exploitation, indifference and caring into consideration. As you can imagine, this is because all nations are connected to one another.

I have a suggestion. Why not think about hunger in another way? Instead of thinking we need to solve global hunger, let’s regard it as a domestic issue, a problem our neighbor has. Then, it will help us to jump into the issue much more easily.

Let me take my country, South Korea, as an example. Nowadays, many people in Korea help children in developing countries with charity funds. These charity funds are basically to help those children finish their schooling and to cover their basic living costs.

Some celebrities appeal to the public that a little help can make the world a better place. The donors give a regular amount of money, usually around $30 to $50 a month, to the charity.

On holidays, charity organizations send letters and cards written by those children to the donors. Since this is one-on-one approach, donors are aware of the children they are helping and thus feel that they are making some positive change in society.

In this sense, I believe hunger can be solved at least to some extent with community-based approaches. Maybe some of you think a one-on-one approach is not that simple so we need a lot more structured organizations to arrange this.

However, my one-on-one approach example is just to get you to grasp the meaning of it. To be more specific, Thailand reduced hunger by half in the 1980s. They had only one nutrition volunteer per 20 households.

China achieved such a reduction in the 1990s using the same method. What we need to focus on is that we need to start dealing with such a big issue on a small scale.

Now is the time to apply this method to the rest of the world. To do so, as I stressed in the beginning, one thing the world desperately needs is to recognize the world as neighbors and to care and support one another.

The writer is a senior at Hanyang University, majoring in media communication.