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Foreign police forces confronting teenage-like rebelliousness apparently makes for more advertizing revenue and moral posturing than starving babies, children and parents. With world news fixated on the Iranian protests more for their dramatic than political value, much too little attention is being paid to the announcement late last week that over one billion people worldwide are hungry. One billion, or a seventh of our species, more than ever previously recorded. One billion.
Facile as it is to feign impotent outrage as the first step in trying to forget this horrification, even fathoming its scale is difficult without being a demographer. The cause is not an easily identifiable singular event, say election fraud or street violence, but rather a systemic mismanagement on both local and global levels that is nearly invisible to all but its victims and perpetuators. This is why last week's announcement is so important, and disappeared so astonishingly quickly.
No single terrorist act, no mass protest or government crackdown is as scary and potentially effective as the prospect of one billion people hungry enough to risk life for food. Exacerbated by the economic crisis in the range of 100 million empty stomachs, hunger is currently the greatest impediment to world peace collectively, to say nothing of the individual peace of the sufferers and that of the societies in which they live and which fail them. Fighting for rights with a full belly is irreconcilably different from being hardly able to because more basic needs are not being met.
What we are appalled by says as much about us as the values we profess, and yes I am referring to Obama's statement today. The officials who broke the one billion hungry people news in Rome stressed the broken link between hunger and peace: soaring prices for staples such as rice triggered riots in the developing world last year. The Iranian protests and crackdown will seem like playground games if one billion hungry people globally revolt in desperation. Meanwhile, we must guard against misplacing our revulsion.
As I contend in the Pyramid of Peace presented as the conclusion of Peace: A World History, nutrition is the cornerstone of world peace, as of all individuals, societies and collectives. And so one billion hungry people is a grossly ignored current event creating a dangerous but preventable future.
