Got Bread? Give to World Hunger
- Jun 26, 2008 - comment
“Obesity costs Mississippi millions” was one of the featured articles in the June 4th edition of The Clarion Ledger. The adult obesity rate for Mississippi in 1991 was more than 15 percent. Now it is 30.6 percent. That is the highest in America. The article suggested obesity cost Mississippi taxpayers $221 million per year. The national medical bill for obesity is approximately $93 billion annually.
These figures are staggering and startling, but do not let them deceive you into believing that hunger and malnutrition are non existent, especially in Mississippi and the rest of the world. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 200,000 Mississippi households live with hunger or the threat of hunger on a regular basis.
The leading cause of hunger is poverty and it is here that Mississippi leads all states. The Food Stamps Program, the first line of defense against hunger, was used by an average of 275,856 Mississippians per month in the year 2000. This past February over 439,373 individuals received food stamps. The number of users has nearly doubled in the past eight years. This program provides an average of 96 cents per meal per person in each household. The escalating cost of food is taking its toll on thousands of families within this state.
This picture gets worse as we gather data from around the world. Jerry Price, in an article featured by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stated that more than 1.2 billion people live below the international poverty level — $1 per day. One half of all the deaths of children under the age of 5 is caused by hunger and starvation. Ten pre-school children die every minute from malnutrition, a number which has not changed in the past 20 years.
All of us have felt the pinch and the pain at the gas pump and at the grocery market but not like the poorest people on this planet. Rice is the staple food for billions of people and it has more than doubled in price since 2003. Over 2.6 billion people worldwide live on $2 per day or less. They have been spending half of that on food and now rising costs takes all they earn just to feed themselves and their families. Nothing is left for housing and medical needs. To put this in perspective, if someone took away 95 percent of your annual income and left you with only 5 percent, how would you fare? (http://www.worldhunger.org)
Less than one month ago a report came from Afghanistan (http://www.irinnews.org) of a 40-year-old father who sold his 11-year-old daughter, Rabia, for $2,000 to a man in Sheberghan, a city in northern Afghanistan, to feed his wife and three younger children. He scavenged in garbage cans for leftover food until the numbers of people doing the same got so large that he could not find enough to feed his family. He asked, “How can someone sell his own child? It’s like selling your eyes or selling your heart! I sold her only to buy food for my younger children who otherwise would have died from hunger.”
What can you and I do to help? Southern Baptists have been promoting the World Hunger Offering for many years during the month of October. Last year Mississippi Baptists gave nearly $236,000 to this effort. If we start planning now to give in October, we can serve even more who are in need.
Historically, Baptists have used rice bowls to collect money for World Hunger, but a new and easy approach is to use empty soup cans (family and regular size) with a special soup can label. These labels can be downloaded from http://www.christianaction.com and copied for churches, small groups, Sunday school classes, families, and children’s projects. Go to the home page and select the Resource tab at the top. Then choose Special Emphasis Sundays where you’ll find them under the World Hunger section.
This article is reprinted with permission from the Mississippi Baptist Christian Action Commission.
Further Learning
Learn more about: Citizenship, Hunger/Homelessness,