Elimination of Hunger

President Carter’s Commission on World Hunger issued as its central recommendation, the proposal that the United States “make the elimination of hunger the primary focus of its relationships with the developing countries.” This has not happened. Repaying debts, maintaining stability, fighting drugs, are but a few of the areas in which we place more importance.

But it is hunger and poverty that primarily create the above mentioned concerns.

If we, as a nation, invested in the agricultural and economic self-sufficiency of developing countries what we are now putting into military expenditures alone, much of what we currently see as problems would disappear.

October is an appropriate month to reconsider our attitudes toward ending hunger and abject poverty throughout the world. Oct. 16, World Food Day, is the birthday of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and points up the importance of food self-sufficiency. October, 1984, the month the famine in Africa made our headlines, reminds us of the terrible consequences of ignoring the importance of food self-sufficiency.

Virtually, everyone who has studied world hunger agrees that it is only the lack of political will that allows hunger to remain as the major killer of humanity.

I sincerely ask all who read this letter to imagine himself or herself living in extreme poverty and hunger. Then learn about world hunger proportions, write your congressmen, senators, the President, talk to your friends, and begin a process in America, of making widespread hunger a relic of the 20th Century, and food self-sufficiency a gift of the 21st Century.

RICHARD ROBINSON

Duarte