World Hunger

The Horn of Africa encompasses Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Kenya. It’s one of the most food insecure regions in the world, characterised by frequent droughts and conflict. Concern about the impact of drought in the region escalated in June, when the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, FEWSNET, reported that this year was among the driest since 1950. source

Over 22,000 children die every day around the world.

That is equivalent to:

• 1 child dying every 4 seconds
• 15 children dying every minute
• A 2010 Haiti earthquake occurring almost every 10 days
• A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring almost every 10 days
• An Iraq-scale death toll every 18–43 days
• Just under 8.1 million children dying every year
• Some 88 million children dying between 2000 and 2009

The silent killers are poverty, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes. Despite the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage.

Unfortunately, it seems that the world still does not notice. It might be reasonable to expect that death and tragedy on this scale should be prime time headlines news. Yet, these issues only surface when there are global meetings or concerts (such as the various G8 summits, the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005, etc).

Images © UNICEF

Furthermore, year after year, we witness that when those campaigns end and the meetings conclude, so does the mainstream media coverage.

It feels as though even when there is some media attention, the ones who suffer are not the ones that compel the mainstream to report, but instead it is the movement of the celebrities and leaders of the wealthy countries that makes this issue newsworthy.

Even rarer in the mainstream media is any thought that wealthy countries may be part of the problem too. The effects of international policies, the current form of globalization, and the influence the wealthy countries have on these processes is rarely looked at.

Instead, promises and pledges from the wealthy, powerful countries, and the corruption of the poorer ones—who receive apparently abundant goodwill—make the headlines; the repeated broken promises, the low quality and quantity of aid, and conditions with unfair strings attached do not.

Accountability of the recipient countries is often mentioned when these issues touch the mainstream. Accountability of the roles that international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and their funders (the wealthy/powerful countries), rarely does. The risk is that citizens of these countries get a false sense of hope creating the misleading impression that appropriate action is taken in their names.

It may be harsh to say the mainstream media is one of the many causes of poverty, as such, but the point here is that their influence is enormous. Silence, as well as noise, can both have an effect.

 source