The World Food Program's famine map of Africa

The situation is dire, and will be far worse than the Ethiopian famine in the previous decade to its wide spread severity. Due to a combination of plague and drought, tens of millions face starvation in coming months. The Famine relief rock concert raised 200 million at the time for Ethiopian famine victims, while, at that time, the daily interest payments on Sub-Saharan debt was 250 million dollars a day (in otherwords the rock concert did not even raise enough to pay the interest on the debt for the day of the concert). The entire debt of the world's most heavily indebted poor countries comes to 250 billion, or about one fifth of the tax cut in the United States. Hospitals have been closed, patients must bring in all their own surgical thread and relative must being food every day, schools go without simple things like chalk, commodities are sold at low prices, as governments are forced to 'restructure' the economy and privatize everything in sight in order to make interest payments on loans which, combined, don't even equal one years worth of spending on the Pentagon, and is just a small fraction of all the combined tax cuts that have been given out in recent times in affluent Northern countries. It goes without saying that nothing is left over for disaster relief, in particular a disaster of such catastrophic scope as what is now unfolding.




The World Food Program's famine map of Asia

Due to the failure of the Monsoon rains earlier this year, India, where most of the hungry people in the world live, is the most hard hit, while hunger affects a great swath of the Asian continent




Hunger In the Americas

Economic collapse, drought, and structural inequalities have combined to create the hunger afflicting Southern American countries. Although it is not shown on the map, there have been reports of starvation deaths among children in Argentina, where the recent economic collapse has plunged over 50 per cent of the population into poverty. The wide spread economic collapse across South America not only throws into questions the imposed policies of 'structural adjustment' forcefully initiated by the World Bank and the IMF, it also helps to explain the current preparations for a coup in Venezuela in order to 'send a message' all over Central and South America (the message being that the current swing to the left taking place in response to the economic catastrophe will be vigorously opposed by Washington, and will only result in one coup after another).


As well, although it is not shown on the maps, Palestinian children are suffering from malnutrition, and poverty and hunger are wide spread in the occupied territories, following the deliberate destruction by the Israeli forces of first the economy and then the infrastructure and institutions since 2000. On the WSWS site : Malnutrition widespread among Palestinian children


The current famine catastrophe is taking place in the midst of a world wide food glut caused by 'over production' of agricultural products. Livestock have traditionally been the prop that has kept modern agriculture from collapse, but even farm animals have not been able to consume the surplus, and farmers have come to depend on subsidies to survive and keep the price of commodities at least above the cost of production.


STARVED BABY COUNTER
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