World Hunger Day 2018
World Hunger Day takes place every year on October 16 and is intended to draw attention to the fact that many millions of people worldwide suffer from hunger. October 16 was chosen as the day because on October 16, 1945, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was founded as a specialized agency of the UN with the task of ensuring global food security.
World Hunger Day or World Food Day was first held in 1979. Since then, it has been held every year in various countries. In addition to official congresses on this day, which deal with the topics of world hunger and world nutrition, NGOs often use World Hunger Day to draw attention to the global hunger problem.
Jean Ziegler: "Hunger refugees are not economic refugees".
Jean Ziegler is a constant advocate for the rights of disadvantaged classes of people, and in his view, at least the principle of provisional admission should be applied to famine refugees. "The humanitarian drama that is taking place in the Mediterranean must be stopped," Ziegler said. "The Europeans are only responding to the problem with military means. Hunger refugees are not economic refugees. They are fighting for their lives."
To this end, Ziegler has suggested a further development of the 1951 Refugee Convention by the UN Human Rights Council.
Problematic biofuels
In connection with the right to food, various organizations have recently drawn attention to the problem of biofuels. Jean Ziegler took up the issue when presenting his report and called for a moratorium on such fuels. Accordingly, no biofuels should be produced for five years.
Biofuels made from corn or grain would drive up the prices of these foods and thus promote hunger, the argument goes.
A 50-liter tank of biofuel in a car would require 200 kilograms of corn. This could feed one person for an entire year.
The term world hunger is used to describe the situation where hundreds of millions of people in the world go hungry. The number of hungry people has increased significantly in recent years, but is rising more slowly than the population:
In 1990, there were about 822 million people; in 2008, there were about 963 million. On June 19, 2009, the BBC reported that one billion people are now officially hungry. That's about one in seven people on the planet. Every year, about 8.8 million people, mostly children, die of hunger, which is equivalent to one death every 3 seconds.
Most hungry people live in Asia and the Pacific region (524 million), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (206 million). Hunger is also a problem in Latin America (52 million), the Middle East (38 million) and many Eastern European countries. Most hungry people live in developing countries (820 million). But there are also hungry people in emerging countries (25 million) and industrialized countries (9 million). (Sources: Wikipedia)
