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India – 1 billion tons of grain rot while poor starve
photo by Partha Sarathi Sahana (Flickr CC)
India: a country of nearly 1.2 billion people with over 28% living under the official poverty line, as defined by Indian government in 2004-2005. Some 400 million of these poor depend on government food handouts, which fall short of meeting demands.
Yet experts say that there are over a billion tons of grain rotting away in government warehouses, an amount that could feed over 600,000 people for 10 years.
And though feeding the poor can be seen as an expense, the consequences of not feeding them are much greater – economically as well as morally. The antipoverty group ActionAid calculates that the poorest nations lose more than ₤290 billion (€346 billion) due to hunger. Halving global hunger by 2015 is estimated to cost just a tenth of that money.
Meanwhile hundreds of millions of Indians are malnourished.
From an IPS News report:
According to a United Nations report released last week, India accounts for 50 percent of the world’s hungry. The Global Hunger Index for 2008, calculated by the International Food Policy Research Institute, estimated that some 350 million Indians were ‘food insecure’, that is uncertain of where their next meal was coming from.
The Indian Supreme court reacted to the news of rotting grain stores by ordering the government to release surplus grain to the poor. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh criticized this move as detrimental to the livelihoods of farmers, despite the fact that any grain given to the poor needs to have been purchased from farmers in the first place.
India desperately needs more adequate grain storage facilities, so why aren’t they being built?
For more on this tragic story, see the following article in the Guardian:
Hunger in India: ‘The real cause is lack of political will’
And watch the following video report from Al Jazeera English:
India’s grain rots as poor starve
Tags: government, grain, hunger, India, Indian, poor, starve
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bloody hell!!!!!!!!! aapse milkar achcha la ga India……