C-SPAN Video: World Hunger, Why and What Can We Do?

This time, I found a very interesting and meaningful video from the C-SPAN online library. The speaker is David Beckmanna, the winner of the World Food Prize. I chose this video because the issue of world hunger is not often concerned by Americans as politics or economic issues, yet it affects millions or even billions of people's lives. Perhaps the issue is not as highly concerned is because most people feel more connected to U.S. politics or economic issues than world hunger. Very true, as a student who is busy with school works and GRE, world hunger will probably not be on the top of my list to pay attention to. However, listening to Mr. Beckmann's speech makes me notice something that I did not notice before. So, even though the video is an hour long, and it doesn't provide as much entertainment as Hollywood movies, I encourage you to spend a little time to listen to what Mr. Beckmann said about world hunger.

Through the whole speech, Mr. Beckmann talked about his experience in remote Africa, and how he believed that Americans should be more active not only in providing foreign aids but also in urging the government to do so. According to Beckmann, the world has made a huge progress in reducing poverty and hunger than in 30 years ago, but more needs to be done. One way to do so, Beckmann said, is through Congress.

Unfortunately, hunger is not an issue only in remote Africa, it's also happening in the United States. I was really surprised when Beckmann provided a statistics that one out of four American kids is living in the household that runs out of food sometimes. Beckmann pointed out that not only foreign assistance is needed but also domestic hunger issue should be concerned. According to Beckmann, the Child Nutrition Bill will expire at the end of this month, and it is important for people to let the Congress know that it is the issue they pay attention to so more can be done for the kids, and also for the poor people.

As I said before, I didn't really pay that much attention on the issue of world hunger. Because of our environment and also because we're so lucky that we never run out of food, we sometimes pay even more attention to the problem of obiesity than hunger. How ironic! We learn how to live healthier by eating a little less or eating more vegetables, while millions of people- including some American kids, according to the speech- have to worry about where they can get enough nutrition to make their bodies function well.

There might not be much that we, as college students, can do to eliminate world hunger for now, but simply by knowing how things are different from our everyday lives makes us less naive, and perhaps we can do little by little to help eliminating world hunger, and to make this world a little better.