Smell of hunger

Hunger is a familiar menace and famine is genocide of its kind because it systematically eliminates a particular group of people, who cannot eat. These people starve at the beginning, and then slowly and gradually they feel severe and racking pangs of hunger as a simmering fire starts to burn in their bellies. But then things improve after a few days, when the pains go away as the body tries to find its strength in its reserve of fat. The reserve of body fat may last for a week or two, maximum three, but after that the body turns to the energy reserves contained in the muscles.

Once hunger goes to muscles, it makes the body listless and depressed, too tired to do anything. Children do not have much energy in their muscles, so they are the first to die. For adults, the body weight falls as the limbs begin to shrink and emaciate.

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The personality of the hungry man undergoes drastic changes. He may fly into irrational and uncontrolled rage or become totally apathetic as death approaches.

We have roughly 6.3 billion people in the world out of which 842 million are hungry. The developed or industrialised world consists of about 50 countries with a combined population of 0.9 billion or less than one-sixth of the world's population. Nearly 5 billion people live in about 125 countries, which make up the developing world and the remaining 0.4 billion live in countries in transition, which include the Baltic states, eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

It is important to throw in the numbers not to impress anyone but to draw the configuration of hunger. In the developing world, more than 1.2 billion people live below the poverty line, earning less than US$1 per day and almost three billion people -- half the world's population -- live on less than two dollars a day. Around 800 million people go hungry in the poor countries, and available evidence indicates that at least 20 million citizens may be hungry in the United States of America for some period of time each month. 153 million children under 5 in the developing world are underweight. Worse yet, 11 million children younger than 5 die every year, more than half from hunger-related causes. Thirty million people die of hunger every year.

We all feel hungry from time to time, especially when we cannot eat on time. Doctors would call it appetite, the urge to eat, the craving for sustenance, the way firewood is supplied to the fireplace to keep it going. The loss of appetite is sign of trouble, it means the body is not behaving itself. We often fast, going without food for virtue or diet, which is kind of customised starvation to suit our needs.

But hunger has a different connotation from appetite as a matter of choice. Hunger is when appetite waits too long without any sign of hope in the horizon. It is when appetite feeds on appetite, and the spark grows into flame. Hunger is when that flame rages in the belly and starts gutting rest of the body. So appetite is stretched to hunger and hunger is stretched to starvation and famine is when that starvation breaks out like an epidemic.

It is said that one cannot be wise with an empty stomach. It is also said that the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach. We have two extremes here, one is the means to eat and another is the means to feed. One is related to hunger, another is related to hospitality. But both underscore the significance of satisfied stomach, which does wonders to mind and body.

Yet the irony of hunger is that there is enough food to satisfy every stomach and make most man fat. There is at least 4.3 pounds of food available per person per day worldwide. Still people die of hunger and malnutrition, like an engine that sputters to a halt for lack of fuel.

In his article The politics of hunger, Ignacio Ramonet expounds that hunger is more a creation of politics than anything else. In countries like Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, North Korea, Burma and Afghanistan, governments and military leaders were holding innocent people hostage and starving them for their political ends, using cruel means at times. In Sierra Leone, Ignacio adds, the men of ex-Corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF), systematically chopped off peasant's hands with machetes to prevent them from cultivating the land.

Ignacio gives us even more startling statistics. The total wealth of the world's three richest individuals is greater than the combined gross domestic product of the 48 poorest countries, which is almost a quarter of the countries in the world. The inequality of income has increased over the last four decades. In 1960 the income of the 20 percent of the world's population living in the richest countries was 30 times greater than that of the 20 % in the poorest countries. That gap in 1995 was 82 times greater. In over 70 countries, per capita income is lower today than it was 20 years ago.

As per the UN calculation, a levy of less than 4 percent on the accumulated wealth of the 225 largest fortunes would be sufficient to meet the basic needs of the entire population of the world. More interestingly, the total cost of the world's sanitation and food requirements come to only $13 billion, which is hardly as much as the people of the United States and the European Union spend each year on perfume.

Have you ever felt the smarts of hunger without knowing when and whether you will get to eat? I have never gone hungry, but I have talked to people who did, and according to them, the entire existence of a hungry man heavily rotates around the lightness in the belly. It is even more difficult for a man with family, for a mother with children, because the opportunity cost of each morsel of food determines who is to die and who is to live.

One person described the experience of hunger as a sea of despair churning in the belly. He described how it devastated his mind first before it got to his body, how he felt the stabbing pain of being isolated in the grim prospects of dying from want in a world of plenty. He wondered why he was chosen to bear the burden of hunger when millions wasted food around him like frolicking children throw water during bath.

The former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in his speech that every gun that was made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signified, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Every day that theft is happening 842 million times and 30 million people are dying every year, perhaps more than the number of people killed by the guns, warships and rockets combined.

Points to ponder if you are not starving today. Bon appetit and congratulations! You are the lucky person who can think of hunger. The hungry ones are too busy thinking of food alone! Next time you put on perfume, remember it is the smell of someone who has not eaten yet.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.