Hunger Games

 

 

 

"Is it possible to feed every living soul on this planet? It simply has to be..."

Sorry. This was a bit of a tease. As much as I like the movie trilogy Hunger Games, this is not what I am addressing. I am talking about getting enough to eat. Enough food to live on. Not just in this country, but all over the world.

The population of this planet is just over 7.1 billion people. It is projected to reach 9.6 billion people by the year 2050. According to Robert Malthus who lived a couple of centuries ago, we all should have starved to death years ago from lack of food. But we have not. There are areas of the world where food is grown in great abundance (like right here!), and other areas where food is very scarce. The trick is to ensure not one human being starves to death or becomes malnourished. Quite a challenge today with 7.1B people. A much bigger challenge in 2050.

So how big is big? How much food does this nation really produce? I will address only two crops - corn and soybeans. If you live in Minnesota, it is hard to drive anywhere in the country without seeing corn and/or soybeans growing for miles and miles in every direction. And many other states are the same way. This year, American farmers were able to produce 14.093B bushels of corn. That is even bigger than last year - and last year was huge! Soybeans also had a good year. 3.182B bushels to be exact.

Those numbers are simply staggering. That is enough to feed everyone in this country as well as a good chunk of the world's population. But why worry about them? Heck, we got ours! In fact, we have so much corn, we burn it to make ethanol. We feed our animals better than many people in the world eat.

We are blessed in this community to have an organization called Feed my Starving Children. They are driven by the desire not to let one person, especially children, go hungry. My wife have worked with this organization. We have packed food. We have talked to people who have been among the poorest of the poor when they receive this food. It is the bread of life to countless people overseas.

This year my wife and her siblings are going to donate funds to World Vision to dig a deep well in Africa. A worthy as it is for organizations such as Feed my Starving Children to send dried food to hungry people, clean potable water is also needed to reconstitute once it arrives on site. So in honor of my Father-in-Law who died earlier this month, the family, along with donations received at his funeral, are going to donate enough funds to have a deep well dug in Africa. This well will serve hundreds, maybe thousands of people for decades to come with life giving water.

As the old adage goes, "From whom much is given, much is expected." Hunger is a problem the world does not to have to deal with in 2015. We have the resources to solve it. In this country, we live deep within the Horn of Plenty. We have so much grain, we don't have enough bins to store it in. But for many in the world, Hunger Games is not a movie, nor is it a game. Getting enough to eat is day to day survival. Each day and every day. We can help. We can fix this. In fact, we can end this.