Dec 13, 2008

How to Eliminate "Death by Starvation" in the World

Einstein said that we could solve any problem if we can define the problem right. So the best way to solve the problem of Death by Starvation in the world is to define what causes that problem and then find solutions to that. So here are the causes for death by starvation:

1.Corrupt leaders and their corrupt associates who hold the global resources to themselves without letting the population have even the minimum that is needed to live.

2.Absence of benevolent leadership who can empathize with the pain of starvation.

3. Egotistic leadership and their egotistic associates, although basically good people yet too arrogant to listen to anyone with any sense and empathy.

4.Indifference of the general population who are also basically good people but too busy to think of the starving children etc. thus go on with their daily survival like sheep.

5.The brainwashed population, who although not sharing the wealth and power with the corrupt and egotistic leadership and their associates as above but still embrace the survival of the fittest political strategy those people advocate as if being brainwashed. Some of these people have stopped thinking but embrace anything that is put to their minds without any question.

If we can get rid of corruption we can eliminate starvation because there is enough food and water on earth for all the habitants. It is the corrupt leaders that won’t allow foreign aid from going into finding solution to poverty, but divert those to their personal benefit.

Imagine what would have happened if Europe, Japan and the rest of the nations had corrupt leaders in place as the USA was giving them massive financial aid through the Marshall Plan. All we could have gotten were a bunch of criminals with money in foreign banks as opposed to the wealthy countries that we can trade with as it is now. Europe, Japan and the other recipients of the Marshall plan fortunately had statesmen who cared about the nation and not personal gain and thus we have managed to build an association of great nations. Take country by country throughout history and you will see that it is the people led by a benevolent leader that has made that country wealthy. If the people were smart the country would be rich and vice versa. Well there are exceptions some times, even when the people are smart if the country is taken over by a ruthless, greedy dictator that one man could turn the whole country into a place with desperate starving people.

It is the greed aided by corruption that lead some people to grab all the resources and keep it for themselves in unlawful means than sharing those resources with the rest of the population who would be willing to work to get a fair share of those resources. The corrupt would grab the limited resources for their gratification and turn the country into barren land with no resources.
This is what creates hunger. It is not that the average person does not want to work.

It is the lack of this corruption due to built-in civilized legal framework and regulations that avoid starvation in the most civilized nations in the world. If you look at it logically you will agree that there is a good reason for having no starvation in civilized countries but finding it only in uncivilized countries, where there is no respect for laws and regulations. So one has to be quite skeptical when powerful people push for too much deregulation. It is like allowing people to drive on highways with no traffic laws.

Since we know that within every few seconds a child dies of hunger, to disregard this fact and be indifferent to it is to be an accomplice to mass murder. Just because we don’t hear the crying and the pleading of children and their families who die each second we cannot pretend that we don’t know that it exists. People who ignore the death of children out of starvation are no different than the good Germans who ignored the existence of death camps in some remote neighborhood.

A slow death by starvation must be quite painful. Compared to that a quick death by any other means may be less sufferable. If you think of it that way, there cannot be any excuse for letting a huge population in the world suffer such a painful death. Instead people and the media should be as outraged as they usually are when one nation declare war against another nation and kill many innocent lives. Keeping that in mind, during this holiday season here is a way every citizen in the world, who has enough to eat, could help alleviate starvation and death.

1. Don’t make a habit of eating any meals at regular times. Wait to eat till you get real hungry. Then when you feel real hungry give yourself one additional hour before you eat and during that precious hour that you are suffering from hunger think of all the children in the world crying out for food and dying each second within that hour. There is no better way to empathize with the hungry than thinking of hunger when you are hungry.

2. Regardless of how hungry you feel during that hour, avoid the temptation to eat and continue to contemplate on the starving kids. As you do that, you will find enough energy to turn your hunger into outrage. Then ride on that energy and write letters and emails to the powerful people in the world claiming that the reason for starvation is corruption and demanding that these people do all in their power to eliminate corruption.

You can begin by writing to the editors of the major media, then to the President and the legislative body and to the major non profit organizations such as Bill Gates foundation.
Here are some points you should consider writing about to the above mentioned powerful and influential people that I request you to write.

3. The major moral crisis in this world is being the starving death of kids it makes no sense to allow the existence of useless organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank or the International Monitory fund financed by the hard working tax payers of the world. Most of the people who work for these international organizations are bureaucrats (don’t take my word for it, make a visit to one of those places and observe what they do). It is a real pity that people mostly in the developed world have to work so hard and pay taxes to pay the salaries of these people. You should take the time to find out what they do about eliminating corruption in the world that is the main cause for starvation. You could raise these questions to the legislative body and the media asking them to look into the agenda of the international organizations.

What we need in the world is an international police or a military force represented by the countries with civilized leaders and systems instead of the UN and the World Bank that live off of taxpayer money. When a rogue dictator comes to power in a country and begin to use it as his private company and commit corruption and let the people of the country go hungry through that process, we should send this international police force to capture that dictator and put him in prison as we did with the dictators of Panama and Iraq.

Request the media to take the time to research and report the countries with corrupt leaders. With that exposure the leaders of the civilized countries could send a warning to the corrupt leaders through their respective embassies (again there is no need to have a United Nation posturing at our expense and doing practically nothing). If these rogues do not heed such warning then we should send in the international police force to get rid of the rogue leader.
As we get rid of corruption, the world could get together as one people and then come up with a way to provide adequate water for all the people. If there is access to water then people could grow food, fish and be self-sufficient. For example the tribes who live in Amazon forests do not go hungry. We can begin with that minimum requirement and then go into giving them education etc.

If every citizen in the world who has enough food to eat do as above, we can eliminate starvation (and all the other repercussions come along with it) in a matter of a few years. Nothing else would eliminate hunger, human rights violations and all the other suffering of mankind. All the talks of 10-year plans to eliminate world hunger are just plain talk of those who have enough to eat and never have to suffer the consequences of starvation, when the answer to this is quite simple. In plain words, eliminate corruption and we an eliminate hunger!