MASS STARVATION: MAYBE SOMEONE HAS A BETTER IDEA

You look around you in this world and can't help wondering. Why does this keep happening? How come nobody has done anything about that? What's the deal with this maniac? Who's idea was such-and such? You fill in the blanks, whatever it is that strikes you as odd, unacceptable or just plain nuts. Some things never seem to grow on us, no matter how long they've been going on. Mass starvation comes to mind as a good example of a time-honoroed practice that is impossible to accept as just the way things are.

As it stands now, 36,000 peple die every day of hunger, the vast majority of them children less than 5 years of age. Now, people being a prety resilient bunch, this starvation process takes a while, and the lead-up to one's death is agonizing. So, with 36,000 a day actually perishing, that means that many millions more of us are in the throes of starvation, fighting against it, even eating clay biscuits, wood pulp, insects, anything in order to survive one more day. It is a slow, excrutiatingly painful process, a torture far beyond that which men have devised to punish one another, what our own laws ban as cruel and unusual punishment.

Well, starvation is extremely cruel, but not at all unusual. 36,000 daily deaths are hardly unusual, even on a planet of 6 billion mouths to feed. And if you do the math, what's the big deal with feeding 6 billion and 36 thousand instead of just the 6 billion? A drop in the bucket, planet-wise. It's just a matter of getting the food to the hungry. Sounds pretty simple but that's not the case. Some places just can't produce enough food. Other countries, like our own United States, produce extraordinary amounts of food. Still others waste their own great potential for producing huge harvests by misusing their fertile land or by farming it as if we were still in the Bronze Age.

And being that our planet is full of sovereign nations with sacrosanct borders there's a lot of red tape involved in getting food to hungry people. And somebody has to pay the farmers for producing this food, the shippers for getting it to them and the workers on the receiving end to distribute it to those who need it most. Nothing is free and nobody's labor is anybody else's to take without proper compensation. And by definition hungry people have no money to pay for all this otherwise they'd buy some food for their families and wouldn't be starving in the first place. And feeding people must be followed up by education and retraining in agricultural methods otherwise the cycle will never end for some regions of the world. While it might be quaint to see pictures in National Geographic of backward people following an ox as they plow their ill-managed farmland, maybe we can all skip that notion like we have gotten past the practices of voodoo medicine and human sacrifice. Let it be the 21st century for everybody, not just the chosen few.

So now you've got to involve governments in the process of feeding people and that's probably the biggest barrier to solving mass starvation. You don't need a degree in political science to realize that many, many governments of many, many nations don't really give a rat's ass about their citizens, their only aim being the acquisition and retention of power and the wealth that power brings. Indeed, many of these governments find starvation a handy tool to eliminate the political opposition, saving a fortune on bullets. In such places food shipments are routinely kept away from the hungry, given as a reward to those loyal to the government or even traded to other nations in exchange for more weapons.

So what do we do about this slaughter? That's exactly what 36,000 daily deaths amount to, vicious slaughter, genocide. When the world possesses the means to end it and does not, what else can this be called? A plague? A disease? The starving person sure doesn't care what it's called, they only want something to eat so that they don't die that day. I don't know the answers to this problem but surely it must involve international cooperation on a scale not seen before. The United Nations does what it can, supposedly, but that's not enough to stave off even one of those 36,000 daily deaths.

If Europe can overcome their long history of slaughtering each other on battlefields by forming the European Union and using a common currency then perhaps the world at large can start cooperating on feeding all humans, no matter what their skin color, religion or political persuasion. Generally hungry people have no politics at all beyond eating, that most basic of human rights. So maybe the United Nations needs to be overhauled, kicking out the corrupt bureaucrats and the inept hand-wringers who's answer to every problem is to form a committee to study it while people are dying.

And just maybe sovereign governments can be persuaded to bow to the authority of a truly united world community to respond to disasters and emergencies within their borders. Starvation is both a disaster and an emergency. The United States could lead the way as the world's reigning superpower by ceding that authority to a revamped and reinvented United Nations, an organization stripped of political aims and in existence only to help human beings wherever and whenever they are in trouble. And it must be be made very clear that to defy the United Nations is to defy the entire world.

The U.N armies must be formidable in order to enforce the feeding of the starving masses, those millions and millions who strive every day not to be numbered among those 36,000 dead souls. That's over 13 million per year, the entire population of many a nation. One and a half Austrias, for example. So it's time to put some good minds to work on this emergency. The floods in America's Midwest are only the latest monkey wrench thrown into the works and there are a thousand other problems to be solved, and the starving will have no voice in the process, yet another problem. It is up to rest of us fortunate enough not to be hungry to help our brothers and sisters so that their voices can one day be heard instead of buried in anonymous graves. Anybody have any good ideas on how to do that?