Hunger kills forty million people each year

We have found an earth-shattering article in a newspaper of the city that we cannot fail transcribe and comment upon, let’s look:

“Serious problem of nutrition for the world’s excessive population is foreseen for the year 2000. In the present time five hundred millions human beings suffer intense malnutrition and over one thousand million are ill in varying degrees of intensity. Naturally these one thousand five hundred million people, that is half of the world’s population, live almost entirely in underdeveloped countries.

“The previous data communicated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was compiled by members of the fact-finding delegations on nutrition diffused all over the world.

“The essential foods that humanity lacks the most are milk and meat, and investigators formulated the following statistical picture. Due to not having milk, some regions of the globes present an infant mortality rate between the ages of one to five years, fifteen times more than those regions where children find adequate nutrition in sufficient quantity. Of the sixty million deaths that happen annually on the the Earth, it is estimated that thirty or forty million are due to the effects of hunger or of malnutrition

FOOD PRODUCTION

“The FAO points out that while Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States have seen their food production rates per person increase from 93, 85 and 85 to 110, 121, and 101 respectively in comparison to before the war, in the Far East such indices have not changed ; In Oceania there has been a decrease from 108 to 105. Africa has seen a decrease from 95 to 94 and for Latin America,the continent whose population is growing at the fastest rate, the food production index has descended between 1940 and 1961 from 104 to 99.

BETTER AND GREATER PRODUCTIVITY

“Due to the frightful growth of the world’s population, it is estimated that if all the inhabitants of the world would sit down to eat at the same table it would stretch 21 times around the globe, and 35 kilometres should be added daily to make room for newcomers, adds the FAO.

“To attend to the world’s nutritional needs in 1980, it will be necessary to have 33 % more cereals and 100 % more milk, meat, eggs and fish. And in the year 2000 these figures must rise by 100%, and 200%, respectively, which will require that the underdeveloped world make a revolution in agriculture similar to that made by the highest income countries which has transformed the agricultural sector into a prosperous activity.

MINIMUM CULTIVATION

“Finally the FAO’s researchers point out that only 10% of the surface of the earth is cultivated; another 17 % of the surface of the earth is composed of swamps and natural pasturelands; 40 % corresponds to natural forests and 43 % — almost half — is unoccupied land. According to the statistical data of that organism, in 1955 there was 0.47 hectares of arable land for each person in the world; in 1950 there was about 0.47 hectares, and in the year 2000 if the current growth rate of the population is maintained, it will be only 0.2 hectares.”

Thus ends the aforementioned article. There is no doubt that humanity experiences hunger due to lack of intelligence. Humanity starves to death for lack of creative comprehension. 43% of the land, that is almost half of it, is unoccupied land.

Remember the immense Amazonian jungles. These deep jungles need people to inhabit them. There are lands that can supply the entire world. The Brazilian government had the intelligence to establish its capital within the Amazonian rainforest, there is no doubt that with this intelligent measure the government of Brazil intends to conquer its own land.

The Amazonian jungles are immensely rich and only the people that work and exploit them are absent. The same thing happens with the jungles of all America. Those are the lands that can and should be cultivated. There is a lot of land to work – almost half of the land is uninhabited – and there is hunger, forty million people per year are dying of hunger because such enormous tracts of land are uninhabited. Why are such enormous tracts of land uninhabited? Why there is hunger when there is so much cultivable, arable land?

One can travel the enormous areas of the Amazon and walk for whole years without finding human beings; and the people starve to death as if there are no lands to plough and to sow. What has become of humanity? So many millions of people, where are they?? Poor people! Poor people!

Millions and millions of people shut inside the cities begging for jobs and dying from hunger. What a shame, it seems incredible that human beings are this stupid. Stuck inside the cities tormenting each other, crying and suffering, and to top it off, dying of hunger as if there were no land to plough and sow, as if the entire universe were only the cities.

A revolution in the agricultural land is needed, it is necessary to decongest urban life. It is essential to establish large agricultural universities. It is urgent to mobilize all the technical resources to the heart of the jungles to finish with hunger, the land belongs to those who work it.

Those who do not work the land they do not have the right to possess her. Let the land be taken away from those who do not work it and be given to those who work it. Let the farmers receive full economic support, be given tools, money, medicines, etc. The Ministry of Agriculture is called to fulfil a colossal mission in every country. We needed to initiate a fight without quarters against hunger and malnutrition. Organized work is needed if we want to defeat hunger . It is necessary to give the Ministry of Agriculture extraordinary powers and enough money to start a real revolution in the agricultural field.

The farmers of the entire world should unionise themselves to accomplish a totally organized agricultural revolution. This is not revolution against the Government, this is a revolution directed by the same Governments. Let the workers get organized and then bring before the Congress of Republics their Just demands.

Let them fight to put true representatives of the people in the Congress. Hunger and poverty are evils that affect the whole world, and that can only be solved through a global mobilization of resources by the hands of humanity. Only through the total mobilization of all the resources that we have at hand can we save ourselves and save the whole world from hunger and poverty.

It is necessary to work, and from now on we invite all the workers of America and of the whole world, to unite to fight in a fight without quarter against hunger and poverty. United we are strong.

Samael Aun Weor