The Pain of Scarcity Within Abundance: Hunger! Hunger! Hunger! In the Pearl of Africa?
During my nursing college times, we had been taught that we MUST stand up whenever reporting to our seniors that a disease X was a medical or surgical emergency! To some, it has surprised you, hasn’t it? Well, even though that culture really sounded weird but, in case it truly reveals how emergent something is and how quick an intervention is required, then I humbly propose that we be standing up whenever reporting about hunger or famine. And as I write this, I am already up on my two legs, standing!
Both Wikipedia’s and our policies’ definitions of the word hunger or famine are misleading for they really do not reflect the physical, psychological, intolerable pain caused by hunger.
Wikipedia defines hunger as, “a condition in which a person, for a sustained period, is unable to eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs.”
To meet basic needs? That sounds like luxury to me! (you need to consider my degrading of basic needs to luxury!).
The same organization defines famine as, “a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, inflation, crop failure, population imbalance, or government policies.”
Personally, I feel like none of the above definitions really brings out the true content of the problem, the real physical and harmful pain caused by failure to find or have lunch or supper for a number of days. Of course, it is not because the above definitions are wrong; just as a problem with all human languages, the definitions simply fail to carry the whole content of what it means to be hungry.
But wait! Before I blame these definitions, let me first know if there are other terms that I do not know that exactly describe hunger;
“the pain, that terrible awkward feeling of almost falling, dizziness, vertigo, headaches, irritability, and spinning, failed vision, stomach pain or ulcers, feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, and feeling cursed, and unlucky that a person undergoes due to having missed food for one, two, three, four, or even seven days. To me, that is the true definition of hunger; the true understanding of that pain and hopelessness that almost calls for suicide!”
Really, when a man, a child, or a woman screams, I am hungry, he or she is actually saying that she or he has that physical pain in his or her whole body caused by having nothing like food in the stomach.
Really, when a man, a child, or a woman screams, I am hungry, he or she is actually saying that she or he has that physical pain in his or her whole body caused by having nothing like food in the stomach.
But why have I brought all the above?
I have experienced hunger more times than I can count and I really know how it feels. And every time I get hungry, I experience the above pain and feelings in my description though the psycho-social and mental feelings of worthlessness, unlucky, feeling cursed, and hopeless may not be there (to be exact, as one gets more empowered to take control of his future, hunger loses grip on you. Even when it (hunger) happens, it is temporary and the person knows it that it is just a matter of time or a day and he will have all the food in the world. That does not hurt).
But let us be more contextual and apply my definition and see the real pain. In 2017, it was reported that more than 10 million Ugandans were struggling with hunger with about 1.6 of these in need of emergent food supplies or risk dying. I surely do not know if they died or got the food supplies (that is for another day) but I want you to imagine those 10 million people experiencing daily hunger pain as i described above. Can you imagine their world?
All I am saying is that let us not take it that a community X or family W is simply struggling with putting food at the table for daily basic nutritional needs, but that that community or family is experiencing hunger pain as I have described. When the report says that a community X has hunger, always imagine children, women, and men spending their days and nights with the palms on their stomachs or abdomen, turning side to side, looking up and down, crying and yawning, feeling the physical pain in all forms and the psycho-social torture as I have described above. For how long can someone (someone who does not have a job or big hopes that it is just a matter of time) hang in there in such pain?
And yet it is what most Ugandans are going through day and night!
The 2018 survey as cited by the Observer reported about 70% of Uganda’s households experiencing terrible hunger with about 69% having no hopes of finding food and 89% worried about running out of food. And as I have emphasized, do not think of the above hunger as simply the struggle to have enough food for basic nutritional needs but also and importantly as the immediate daily physical and mental pain such families and individuals experience on daily basis; true pain.
Regions most affected? Not necessary now (anyway, the report shows Karamoja, Central, and Teso to be the most struggling)
But why all that pain? Why hunger in the pearl of Africa?
Hunger surrounded with abundance!
Surprisingly, World Food Program reports that Uganda produces more food than she consumes. In other words, people are dying of hunger not because there is no food in the country; it is because they cannot take share of the food basket. Yes, let me be open; they do not have money to buy food. And so, they die of hunger in a country of abundance!
WFP (World Food Program) estimates that more than 19% of Uganda’s population live below the poverty line (that would roughly mean that more than 8 million people do not even earn 7000 in a day). The national reports (by UBOS, 2017) highlighted that these 19% poor people increased to 27% in 2016/2017. That is very scaring!
Of course, so many other reasons for hunger, including the increased number of refugees (more than a million), ever increasing population, poor government commitment and policies, and, maybe as suggested by Mzee Museveni, our laziness and spending days taking alcohol, dancing in our churches, or scrolling our profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp have been cited but they all come to one thing; LACK OF MONEY!
Everything has been turned into money: Lack of it denies us access to resources
Yes, it is only the lack of money that makes me sleep on an empty stomach when my neighbor has a lot of bananas and fruits that are almost rotting in her fridge or excess beans that weevils are feeding on or excess cooked food that she pours out in the trashcan every evening. It is the lack of money that people can even die of hunger when supermarkets have surplus, excess bread and fruits beyond expiry dates. It is truly the lack of money that people sleep on streets when thousands of rooms in our country are unoccupied. It is truly the lack of money that babies are dying for lack of Oxygen in the pediatric ward or mothers bleeding to death in the emergency room. It is all because of money (lack of it for some and having or loving it for others-I tried to explain this earlier in other articles).
Surprisingly, having money or not having it has the same end; misery! (we shall have more discussions on this).
So, what can be done to relieve the pain?
Should we emphasize the production of more food? How about we help people get more money? Is that a solution? How about we simply removed money and directly enable people to connect to or with resources, with what they need? Is this really feasible? We even had barter trade and it failed us, how better can we have it now? How about we simply change how we value and use money as Charles Eisenstein or our forefather Silvio Gesell suggest? Does sharing economy have answers?
Seriously, we cannot think of one proper and exact solution to this, but a combination of many strategies and proven principles like the ones I have questioned above might help. That is what #SacredEntrepreneurship, a branch of The Complete You Ministry shall help address. Do you have better ideas? Can you join us?
God bless you