Kevin Carter's famous photo of Sudanese poor girl

In March 1993, photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan, where he took now iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod. Carter said he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. (The parents of the girl were busy taking food from the same UN plane Carter took to Ayod).

The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993 as ‘metaphor for Africa’s despair’. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run an unusual special editor’s note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. Journalists in the Sudan were told not to touch the famine victims, because of the risk of transmitting disease, but Carter came under criticism for not helping the girl. ”The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” read one editorial.

Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up,” he confided in a friend. Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the little girl’s fate, he committed suicide three months later.

source:

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com

925 million hungry people in 2010

925 million hungry people in 2010. Is that real???
Check this out...

925 million people is 13.6 percent of the estimated world population of 6.8 billion. Nearly all of the undernourished are in developing countries. 

In round numbers there are 7 billion people in the world. Thus, with an estimated 925 million hungry people in the world, 13.1 percent, or almost 1 in 7 people are hungry.

Children are the most visible victims of undernutrition.  Children who are poorly nourished suffer up to 160 days of illness each year. Poor nutrition plays a role in at least half of the 10.9 million child deaths each year--five million deaths.  Undernutrition magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria. The estimated proportions of deaths in which undernutrition is an underlying cause are roughly similar for diarrhea (61%), malaria (57%), pneumonia (52%), and measles (45%) (Black 2003, Bryce 2005). Malnutrition can also be caused by diseases, such as the diseases that cause diarrhea, by reducing the body's ability to convert food into usable nutrients. 

Source:
worldhunger.org

Child hunger: Shame on us

Child hunger: Shame on us

Aid agency Save the Children has launched a report and survey examining what the world's hungriest children are eating and the tough choices parents are making amid rising food prices.

"The issue with stunting is that if it happens in the first two years of your life, it's very, very difficult to repair and reverse that. It tends to be irreparable in most of these situations. If we can focus efforts on that 1,000-day window from conception until the second birthday, we will have a transformational impact."

- Brendan Cox, the director of policy and advocacy for Save the Children



The report entitled A life free from hunger says 300 children are dying of malnutrition each hour, totaling 2.6 million every year.

It also looks at the lost potential of 170 million children who are physically and mentally stunted and therefore set to earn 20 per cent less than their healthier counterparts.

A year of record food prices has forced millions of parents in the developing world to cut back on food for their children, says the agency.

The survey was conducted with families in India, Bangladesh, Peru, Pakistan and Nigeria.

One-in-six parents said their children were abandoning school to help out by working for food.

"The emphasis in the developed world has been on too much food, going by the debates on the European Union's common agricultural policy. Not so long ago we were worrying about wine lakes, cereal mountains and milk lakes, and they were just an artefact of a very distorted system."

- Richard Tiffin, the director of the Centre for Food Security at the University of Reading

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the report is that there are numerous viable solutions to this crisis that are not being exercised because of failed public policy and chronic under-investment.

Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, one of the countries surveyed, describes chronic malnutrition as the country's greatest shame.

What or who is responsible for this tragedy? Is food aid the solution? Or are there other ways of tackling child malnutrition? And what is at stake for the world's children if the crisis continues? What would it take to save a starving generation?

Source:
Al-Jazeera