Famine

„GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER.“

By Amelia Blanford Edwards

Give me three grains of corn, Mother,

Only three grains of corn;

It will keep the little life I have

Till the coming of the morn.

I am dying of hunger and cold, Mother,

Dying of hunger and cold;

And half the agony of such a death

My lips have never told.

It has gnawed like a wolf at my heart, Mother,

A wolf that is fierce for blood;

All the livelong day, and the nnight beside,

Gnawing for lack of food.

I dreamed of bread in my sleep, Mother,

And the sight was heaven to see;

I awoke with an eager, famishing lip,

But you had no bread for me.

How could I look to you, Mother,

How could I look to you

For bread to give to your starving boy,

When you were starving too?

For I read the famine in your cheek,

And in your eyes so wild,

And I felt it in your bony hand,

As you llaid it on your child.

The Queen has lands and gold, Mother,

The Queen has lands and gold,

While you are forced to your empty breast

A skeleton babe to hold-

A babe that is dying of want, Mother,

As I am dying nnow,

With a ghastly look in its sunken eye,

And famine upon its brow.

There is many a brave heart here, Mother,

Dying of want and cold,

While only across the Channel, Mother,

Are many that roll in gold;

There are rich and proud men there, Mother,

With wondrous wealth to view,

And the bread they fling to their dogs tonight

Would give life to me and you.

What has poor Ireland done, Mother,

What has poor Ireland done,

That the world looks on, and sees us starve,

Perishing one by one?

Do the men of England care not, Mother,

The great men and the high,

For the suffering sons of Erin’s Isle,

Whether they live or die?

Come nearer to my side, Mother,

Come nearer to my side,

And hold mme fondly, as you held

My father when he died;

Quick, for I cannot see you, Mother,

My breath is almost gone;

Mother! Dear Mother! Ere I die,

Give me three grains of corn.

„THE SONG OF THE FAMINE“ By Anomymous

Want! want! want! Under the harvest moon;

Want! want! want! Thro’ dark December’s gloom;

To face the fasting day upon the frozen flags!

And fasting turn away to cower beneath a rag.

Food! food! food! Beware before you spurn,

Ere the cravings of the famishing to loathing mmadness turn;For hunger is a fearful spell, And fearful work is done,

Where the key to many a reeking crime is the curse of living on !

For horrid instincts cleave unto the starving life,

And the crumbs they grudge from plenty’s feast but lengthen out the strife –

But lengthen out the pest upon the fetid air,

Alike within the country hut and the city’s crowded lair.

Home! home! home! A dreary, fireless hole –

A miry floor and a dripping roof, and a little straw — its whole.

Only the ashes that smoulder not, their blaze was long ago,And the empty space for kettle and pot where once they stood in a row!

Only the naked coffin of deal, and the little body within,

I cannot shut it out from my sight, so hunger-bitten and thin; –

I hear the small weak moan – the stare of the hungry eye,

Though my heart was full of a strange, strange joy the moment I saw it die.

I had food for it e’er yesterday, but the hard crust came too late –

It lay dry between the dying lips, and I loathed it — yet I ate.

Three children lie by a cold stark corpse In a room that’ s oover head –

They have not strength to earn a meal,

Or sense to bury the dead!

And oh! but hunger’s a cruel heart, I shudder at my own,

As I wake my child at a tearless wake, All lightless and alone!

I think of the grave that waits, and waits but the dawn of day,

And a wish is rife in my weary heart –I strive and strive, but it won’t depart-

I cannot put it away.

Food! food! food! For the hopeless day’s begun;

Thank God there’s one the less to feed! I thank God it is my son!

And oh! the dirty winding sheet, and oh! the shallow grave!

Yet your mother envies you the same of all the alms they gave!

Death! death! death! In lane, and alley, and street,

Each hand is skinny that holds the bier, and totters each bearer’s feet;

The livid faces mock their woe, and the eyes refuse a tear;

For Famine’s gnawing every heart, and tramples on love and fear!

Cold! cold! cold! In the snow, and frost, and sleet,

Cowering over a fireless hearth, or perishing in the street,

Under the country’s hedge, On the cabin’s miry floor,

In hunger, sickness, and nakedness, it’s oh! God help the poor.

It’s oh! if the wealthy kknew a tithe of the bitter dole

That coils and coils round the bursting heart like a fiend, to tempt the soul!

Hunger, and thirst, and nakedness, sorrow, and sickness, and cold,

It’s hard to bear when the blood is young, and hard when the blood is old.

Sick! sick! sick! With an aching, swimming brain,

And the fierceness of the fever-thirst, and the maddening famine pain.

On many a happy face to gaze as it passes by –

To turn from hard and pitiless hearts, and look up for leave to die.

Food! food! food! Through splendid street and square,

Food! food! food! Where is enough and to spare;

And ever so meager the dole that falls, What trembling fingers start,

The strongest snatch it from the weak, For hunger through walls of stone would break

FAIRY TALE ABOUT THE FAMINE

By Marielle Volper

A long, long time ago near Point Hope there was a village. The people of the village did not have much food because the animals were all hiding. The people said to each other, „If we want to stay alive we will have to move.“

They packed up and they left their village. They went a long, long way. At last they found a place to stay,

on the banks of the Yukon River. They looked around their new place. Someone shouted out, „There’s a caribou!“

The people were very excited. This was the first caribou any of them had seen in a long time. The animals had heard about the starving people. They felt bad for the people and came out of hiding. The animals let the people kill them and the people had many caribou to eat.

A BILLION STARVING PEOPLE

I find it hard to turn away, aa billion starving people,

But what can one do, I’ve heard you say – you can’t save someone’s life

I want to save a life today, I want to get someone close with my Father.

Be them the bread of life today, I want to help them get stronger, help them last longer

And give them a chance to see Jesus.

I find it hard to just ignore, the murdered unborn children,

Yes times have changed, but still God warns, you shall not take a life.

I wwant to save a life today, I want to keep one alive for my Father,

Who will avenge the blood!

Of weak and helpless ones someday – whose lives are spilled out like water,

Lambs in the slaughter, and each one is handmade bby Jesus.

I find it hard to turn away, a billion starving people, a billion starving people.

The United Nations finally announced plans to feed the destitute people of Goma yesterday, almost a week after a river of molten lava swept through the town from the erupting Mount Nyiragongo.

Declaring the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern capital safe – three days after virtually all its 350,000 residents returned – UN officials said food would be handed out today.

But the continuing danger of earthquakes was highlighted when the World Food Programme’s headquarters at Gisenyi, a mile from Goma, was cracked from top to bottom last night.

The UN announcement followed fierce criticism from aid agencies of its handling of the disaster caused bby last Thursday’s eruption. It refused to deliver aid to the town until an expert arrived to give the all-clear, despite having large stockpiles there.

„It is quite unbelievable that the UN has all this food and hasn’t given anything out,“ Aloys Tegera, a development scientist in Goma, said. „It is more concerned about covering its back than protecting people in really terrible need.“

Laura Melo of the World Food Programme confirmed that the UN agency had 1,000 tonnes of mmaize, pulses and oil stored in one of the few buildings in Goma untouched by lava and looters. „But we were too concerned about the safety issue,“ she said.

Patrick Nicholson of Cafod, the Catholic agency which is coordinating the distribution, said the desperate need for food should have overriden fears about safety.

„A one-off emergency distribution would have been a recognition of the realities here,“ he said.

Arriving in Goma late on Monday, Jacques Durieux, a French vulcanologist, said there was no immediate risk of further lava flows into the town. But serious concern about earthquakes remained.

„These are big quakes. They will not cause a catastrophe à la Gujarat. But we cannot rule out a big one,“ Piero Calvino-Parisetti, head of the UN disaster team, said.

Several people were killed outside Goma early on Monday when a quake destroyed their houses.

Maize and bananas were on sale in Goma’s markets yesterday, but people beggared by the eruption had no money. With no real banking system in the town, most of those who lost houses lost everything.

„I am walking because if I sit down I am too hungry,“ said Jean Mopenzi, who has three children, no job, and nnow no possessions.

———

The president of Zambia says his nation would „rather starve“ than feed genetically modified corn to its people.

Presidents, of course, are seldom hungry. But they do risk being deposed, sometimes violently, by people who are. So when the government of Zambia recently said thanks but no thanks to much-needed food aid that was to contain more than 50,000 tons of genetically modified corn from the United States, it was one of the most significant pieces of evidence that the rest of the world has not joined the United States in its unquestioning acceptance of what the British call „Frankenstein foods.“

The Zambian story has received next to no coverage in the American press. Which isn’t surprising, given that it hasn’t given much attention to the larger story—the pending famine in six southern African nations. And given that Americans and their media, generally, have been lambs to the slaughter when it comes to accepting genetically modified everything in our diets.

The Zambia story has been of somewhat more interest in Britain and the rest of Europe, where resistance to GM foods has also been strong. So strong, in fact, that the London newspaper The Guardian recently reported tthat Monsanto, the American corporation on the cutting edge of agricultural biotech, has basically given up on having GM crops accepted anywhere in the European Union before 2005. If ever.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, long a friend of GM technology, is now in favor a face-saving „national debate“ that will give him cover for reversing his view. Blair’s Cabinet ministers are doing the BBC chat show circuit, vowing not to be pressured, or „bounced,“ as Environment Minister Michael Meacher put it, into accepting GM foods.

Whether it is corn that produces its own bug killer, soybeans that stand up to a certain brand of weed killer or beef laced with growth-stimulating hormones, Europeans are refusing to grow or eat stuff that Americans blithely, and blindly, consume every day. In response, America is pulling out all the stops, including complaints to the World Trade Organization, to pressure Europe to accept the genetically modified foods American companies and American farmers produce.

It’s a position that infected the last administration as well as the current one. A note on the USDA’s Web site, left over from the Clinton administration, says that it is the department’s mission „to facilitate the marketing of bioengineered

products in both the domestic and international markets.“ Toward the end of his run, Clinton Ag Secretary Dan Glickman was heard to comment that investing economic and diplomatic capital pushing products that people just don’t want can be a real waste. No such common sense thinking has been heard from anyone in the Bush administration.

While biotech products now in commercial use supposedly increase yields and/or cut costs for American farmers, the big promise of biotech has been to help ffeed the truly hungry of the world, such as those in Africa. Those who favor the technology argue that it is elitist in the extreme for well-fed Europeans, and the few Americans who seem to care, to deprive the truly hungry of a chance at rescue.

The current statement by the Zambian government is a case of a nation that is not awash in surplus grain raising questions about GM foods. Of course, Zambia announced that it had found a ssource of non-GM corn to replace that offered by the United States, so that stark choice may be put off for a while.

Also swept under the rug, for now, is the brand new UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, tthe one that points out yet again that hunger is a factor of economics and distribution, not production. The one that says GM crops may someday show some potential for making marginal land productive—if and when all the health and safety concerns are dealt with.

Zambia can still say it doesn’t want GM corn. Two of its neighbors, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, can still say that they will accept it if it is already milled.

All three, obviously, are not worried about the danger of anyone eating GM corn so much as they are about the possibility that their farmers, who still hope to make a comeback into the international market, will plant some of it, contaminate neighboring fields with GM ppollen, and get the whole continent’s output banned from the European market.

Just as many of America’s products are now.

starving apibrėžimai anglų kalba internete:

• starvation: the act of depriving of food or subjecting to famine; „the beseigers used starvation to induce surrender“; „they were charged with the starvation of children in their care“

• starved: suffering from lack of food

Not Only is this Baby Starving and Scrabbling for Food he is subjected to the Indignity of being covered in Flies.

STARVING CHILDREN

In tthe West, we take a lot of things for granted. In the USA, the UK and some other countries in Europe, the standard of living is very high. At the end of a not so colorful spectrum, there are countries who have citizens that have no standard of living, at all.

Around 50,000 people die every day in the Third World.

Every Time this clock hand sweeps, a child dies of hunger

Frequently we see vivid photographs of famine-stricken children and are weighed down by the breathtaking mission of feeding planet Earth’s starving millions. Why, we question, is there so much hunger in the world today? One solution can be broken down into FOUR categories: Poverty, Population, Priorities & effecting the other.

Poverty, Population, Priorities & Politics

The one obvious explanation for starvation is POVERTY . The underprivileged are usually hungry, and the hungry are usually poor. In 1st World countries, we have the luxury of only worrying about our quality of life and the standard of living. However, in 3rd World countries, where there is no relative standard of living, the motivation of life quality shifts to the simple act of supporting life; i.e. survival.

A key problem here is Capital Investment, wwhich most 3rd World Countries do not readily have. They have no or little money to spend on agricultural or its development when they have hungry mouths to feed, and medical problems to consider.

The second reason for hunger, and it is probably the biggest problem that planet Earth faces, is POPULATION . Most every country has experienced an ongoing growth in population, but the greatest impact has been ironically in the world’s poorest countries, experiencing exponential growth in their number.

Observe how the exponential growth of population shortens our response time to related catastrophes. Earth did not reach a population of 1 billion until about circa 1900. It took the world hundreds of thousands of years to reach this. By the mid 20th century, the world’s population had grown to 2 billion. So the population had doubled in just 50 years. By the seventies, we had over 4 billion people, so the doubling time had decreased to just 25 years. On October 12th 1999, this momentous year, the world’s population reached the six billion mark. It is also predicted by our United Nations that there will be 8.5 billion of us by 2025.

This exponential growth puts a massive global sstrain on our capability to provide resources and services to a starving world, taking into consideration the Western World’s wish to hold onto their standard of living. Imagine if your own town had its resident number double every 25 years, you would have to increase twofold the number of houses, double up the number of supermarkets, roads, and double the capacity of your local sewage treatment facility.

Such growth would be a significant strain on any community especially any 3rd World country. So needless to say, the problem of world hunger is aggravated by population growth.

A third reason for world hunger is PRIORITIES, personal and governmental. Those of us who live in an industrialized society, place a possibly selfish high priority on comfort and convenience.

Per capita, we eat heartedly, on obscene levels. Perhaps the top ten richest countries, place such a substantial strain on the world economy, that it leaves little left for many others who struggle to survive.

When a major 1st World country has only a 1 percent growth rate, that influence is eight times more than a 3rd world country having a growth rate of over 20%. The reason for this is that

we use a lot more resources to maintain our standard of living.

Currently it costs 30 times more, in terms of energy and resources, to feed and see to a North American citizen, at the rate that they would expect and demand. This, as against what it would cost to satisfy some Asian or African citizen’s expectations. But ironically the cost of keeping 30 starving people alive, costs much less than keeping one USA citizen living in their present standard oof living.

However, who could possibly blame any citizen of the world not to expect the best that they can get. Also what Reasonable Man feels guilty just because he and his family is better off than some other less fortunate group, especially when he has no real control over this erroneous situation.

The fourth reason, is POLITICS, or sometimes the lack of it. We do not have enough space here, of years to live, to talk about all the trials aand tribulations that politics has offered our world. But thus far, it does not look so good.

Politics noun – treated as singular. or plural The art and science of government. Public life and affairs. Political principles or practice, e.g. – wwhat are his politics? – Activities concerned with seeking power, status, etc.

If we consider only the last 50 years, when the United Nations was formed; we can and must ask what have they done to halt famine, wars & conflict.

Why has there been a million times more spent on arms and Weapons of Mass Destruction, than feeding the Third World?

Where are all the principles that the UN talked about, and put down on paper, all those years ago?

This world, thanks to the UN, among others, is much worse off than it was 50 years ago.

Why is not every country a democratic state?

Why are countries and the representatives of non-democratic states, allowed in the UN?

Such as:

Many MMiddle Eastern Countries

Far East countries like China, North Korea

Many African countries

Democracy is the only government that we should allow – All non-democratic countries should not have a place in the UN.

If we consider that, a country is not automatically an area of land but a race, a culture, a group of human beings. Then, if we foolishly believe in a democratic political system for ourselves, where in theory all subjects are equal, and have freedom of speech, the laws ccould be said to emanate, not from the country per se, but from the people.

However, if all the laws are made by one person, or just one small elite group, regardless of any other view, then these laws are not the laws of another country, are they? They are the laws and rules of maybe 0.0001% of the people. the UN may feel that this is fair, and that we should ignore this incongruity, we do not.

We do not believe in racial rights, or women’s rights or Gay rights, we believe in Equal Rights. Equal Rights for everyone, and that means every person on the planet. We are guilty when we ignore the plight of others, the plight of others in other countries is our business.

Its achievements include:

• food security and the fight against hunger have become important topics in the development-policy debate in Germany

• all the major German actors concerned with „global food“, cooperate in a joint working group

• Germany is internationally recognised as a significant actor in the context of food security.

The illustration shows a clear trend in successfully reducing hunger, particularly in East Asia, South-East Asia and South America. By contrast, the number of people suffering ffrom hunger in Africa, particularly in sub-Sahara Africa, has risen considerably.

Human Die-offs – Famine

One of the greatest causes of human die-offs is that of famine. Without focusing too much on the effect of government policies in causing famines, one might want to understand the magnitude and nature of the major famines of the past. Note that the famines in Ireland and the Ukraine are fairly well documented on the web, whereas the famines in India and China are not.

India

• 1943-1944 3 million dead

• 1896-1900 19 million dead

• 1876-1879 10 million dead

China

• 1958-1961 30 million dead „Great Leap Forward“

• 1927-1929 6 million dead

• 1896-1900 10 million dead

• 1876-1879 13 million dead

USSR/Ukraine

• 1921-23 5 million dead

• 1930-1933 6 million dead – links: A B C

Ireland

• 1846-1850 1.5 million dead „Potato Famine“

Ethiopia

• 1984-1985 1 million dead

Congo (Biafra)

• 1967-1970 1 million dead

Brazil

• 1876-1879 1 million dead