Hunger. Poverty. How are we still allowing this to continue?

Ending world hunger is possible – so why hasn't it been done? Some 850 million people go to bed hungry. If the right decisions are made now, we can feed the world and address inequality

Duncan Green - Oxfam:  in The Guardian CIF  this week

Poor diet kills 2.6 million infants a year, says survey by Save the Children. The Charity calls on David Cameron to host a world hunger summit in London along with 2012 Olympics.

Simon Tisdall - The Guardian CIF

Like Suzanne Moore in her article this week in the Guardian Comment is Free section (See quote below and please, please go read the whole article), I am in despair.

After 49 years of being alive, and within this lifetime countless times of being told that "the world isn't fair", or that "there will always be poverty, hunger and inequality"; I yet again CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY.

If this makes me idealistic and naive then so be it.

I am so.

I cannot help it and believe me I have tried.

So I once again despair, at the way that we continue to deny that our systems have failed and continue to fail people in developing countries. This just makes me want to bang my head against the wall. We know what needs doing and yet we do not do it well enough. We make excuses. Our leaders continue to do what is best for the rich companies. We deny the problem of hunger is solvable...... It is too difficult we say, what about the leaders of those poor countries...they are corrupt...why should we help them...it is their responsibility not ours.

 AND my heart hurts a little more every day, at the way we in the UK and other rich countries are now so judgemental and blaming of poor people in our own society. We deny there is poverty in our countries. We deny that relative poverty is anything to be whinging about. We blame the individual and rip away at any sense of a collective responsibility for looking after the most vulnerable. This blame game is led by our politicians, our Prime Minister plays a dangerous labelling game when he uses the term "benefit scroungers". It is a clever game to play, to divide and rule, to turn the poorer folks on each other, and to tell them to take responsibility for their poverty....then the rich, and the systems that keep them so, will be safe.

This week has been a shocking one, on the one hand charities are asking us to contact Politicians to name a day to lead a final push to end global hunger(please click and get involved). It is shocking for this one woman, that for most of her life we have been asking for this and that we are still asking. Another shock was that BBC Panorama report(see also below) about poverty and hunger came from the richest country on earth, and showed people living in drains and children speaking about their mother having to eat rats. I already knew that the problems of homelessness and poverty in the USA were increasing but seeing this film....words fail me.

Those who deny that poverty exists in the West need reminding that both Save the Children and Oxfam work on projects to tackle poverty in the UK and in the USA.

I can't help but include this long quote from Suzanne Moore's article mentioned above. It does seem that we allow poverty and hunger to continue, to feed the divisions and the systems that keep the rich, rich.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn't starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn't properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn't all this the fault of the countries they live in? 

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labour, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely "trickled down" from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.

The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.