In the article “The new face of hunger” by Tracie McMillon, hunger is a major crisis in America that needs to be addressed. Hunger also referred to as “food insecure” in the article refers to a state where a person is unable to meet his or her basic nutritional needs due to lack of sufficient food for a sustainable period (McMillon 1). Hunger is a world crisis, and it’s caused by natural calamities as well as human activities. Hunger affects every person with no regards to race, tribe, marital status and body size.
In most cases, financial constraints due to low pay wages and the need to strike a balance between meeting the basic needs and wants make people unable to get sufficient food to meet their basic nutritional needs. About the article “The new face of hunger,” Jacqueline Christian is a mother working at Houston. She has an older son, 15 years of age called Ja’Zarrian and a 7-year-old, Jerimiah living in a homeless shelter. Her salary of 7.75 dollars per hour which she earns by going around Houston’s sprawl to see her clients is not enough to cater for her and the children’s basic needs (McMillon 4). She is forced to buy food since her tight schedule overwhelms her and it also saves time compared to cooking.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Most of the low-income workers do not eat healthily. They always eat to satisfy their hunger and to keep moving irrespective of whether they are taking a well-balanced diet or not. It’s a one day at a time life they live and eat what they can afford. From the article, it is evident that there has been an increase of 48 million number of people going hungry by 2012 since the late 1960’s with the inclusion of a 57% increase since late 1990’s (McMillon 2). The food prices of healthy food are high thus the working poor can’t afford, and they opt to buy low priced unhealthy food.
Hunger is a crisis which can be handled through various interventions. There is need to produce higher yields for consumption and to avoid shortages. Poor farmers should be trained and empowered to enable them to adopt better farming techniques that will ensure sufficient production. The government and other agricultural agencies should offer vouchers to help farmers buy fertilizers and other farming equipment.
The growth of better crops is a necessity to deal with this calamity. Planting of genetically modified crops or even traditionally plant breeding and drought-resistant crops for the production of highly valued crops. This may ensure that there are sufficient yields for all the people for a given period (McMillon 6). The crops planted should be ones that can be relied upon to sustain and meet the basic needs of the people. These may include soybeans and corn. Use of genetically modified crops and conventional breeding have led to improved agricultural yields in recent years and thus this ensures there is no shortage of food and the basic needs of consumers are met.
Reduced consumption of some of some products in this case meat is a consideration to reducing hunger. As a matter of fact, a lot of corn is used in feeding the animals to increase meat production and the higher the prices of corn, the higher the rates of meat. Corn in the US is used for livestock feeding to increase meat production. This corn, however, can be consumed by people.
Trade barriers such as massive subsidies for domestic agriculture in the US need to be broken down so as to give the small-scale farmers an easy time to sell their domestic products to the locals. Export barriers should be done away with so as to allow internal food to be shored and supplied so that every individual can acquire affordable and quality food.
Works Cited
McMillon, Tracie. The new face of hunger.
