CITIZEN JOURNALISM: Fighting hunger takes effort

Recent reports of a surge in demand for food-bank services in the D.C. area might cause

some to shrug their shoulders and declare, “Hunger happens.”

But the truth is that people don’t have to go to sleep on achingly empty stomachs. Certainly not on the scale we see today, whether it’s half a block - or half a world - away.

More than 500,000 Washington-area residents are at risk of being hungry, according to the Capital Area Food Bank. On a global scale, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 1 billion people - one-sixth of the world’s population - suffer from chronic hunger, struggling through extended periods without enough food.

In many cultures, women and girls eat after the men and are given smaller amounts, though it is women who are most likely to feed their families and lead the way to solutions for entire communities. Yet many hunger initiatives are gender-blind.

That is changing. The role of women is at the heart of several efforts to comprehensively address and combat the underlying causes of chronic hunger.

A bipartisan group of senators in 2004 formed the Hunger Caucus to support legislative initiatives to help address hunger both domestically and globally. Backed by a growing group of government officials and activists, they say the solutions to hunger here - and around the world - require the U.S. to develop sound hunger-fighting strategies.

Under the leadership of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Obama administration has made fighting global hunger a priority, outlining a comprehensive approach in a new initiative to what is called “food security.”

Sen. Richard G. Lugar, Indiana Republican, a longtime advocate to end global hunger, is calling for food security. He has introduced the Global Food Security Act, which has garnered bipartisan support and already passed a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The bill calls for the U.S. not only to make emergency responses more effective but also to address the root causes of chronic hunger, ensuring long-term food security by investing in agriculture.

In the House of Representatives, Hunger Caucus Co-chairmen Jim McGovern, Massachusetts Democrat, and Jo Ann Emerson, Montana Republican, have introduced the Roadmap to End Global Hunger Act. The House and Senate have included funding for hunger programs in their spending bills.

In 2000, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, nearly 200 nations, including the United States, pledged to cut in half the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015. In his first budget request to Congress, President Obama proposed to double funding for international agricultural development to more than $1 billion. This is another key component to food security and an area that has been severely neglected for decades.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone. The problem is that it is very inequitably distributed. According to the anti-poverty nonprofit CARE, promoting food security means combating the underlying causes of hunger. Doing so would require policies to protect the most vulnerable people.

• Blake Selzer is a senior policy advocate at CARE.