’Yemen: A Nation on the Brink of Famine’- themaneater.com
Don’t waste food because elsewhere children are starving," is a common phrase parents often tell their children in many modern American homes. The phrase encourages us to think about the mountains of food waste brought about by production companies every day. The National Resources Defense Council reports that about 40 percent of food produced in the United States never actually gets eaten, leading to over $165 million in food waste.
Elsewhere, starvation is a normal day-to-day experience. The turbulent civil conflicts in Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, have left the nation’s population on the brink of famine. The northern Shia Muslim rebels, or Houthis, are currently in control of several parts in Yemen, including the capital city of Sana’a. In March, the Yemeni government was forced into exile by forces loyal to Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The ongoing displays of violence are preventing aid assistance from reaching areas in need.
In addition to this, a bomb recently hit one of Yemen’s most vital ports, Aden, leaving the welfare of its people hanging in the balance. Residential neighborhoods have been destroyed, forcing people to live in local mosques and school buildings, which have little access to medicine, food or clean water.
Neighborhoods have been flooded with sewage waste, which causes the spread of malaria, diarrhea and skin diseases amongst children and adults. Hospital workers are being overwhelmed by the number of patients needing treatment, and are suggesting that some victims may need to be taken abroad because of health conditions too serious to be treated in Yemen.
Recent statistics from the United Nations say that of the 26 million Yemeni people, more than 21 million are in need of some sort of humanitarian aid. Twenty million civilians have difficulty access to clean drinking water and sanitation, while 12.9 million are plagued by starvation. By contrast, many more Americans struggle with eating too much food rather than getting too little.
In the US, more than a third of the population is obese, while nearly three in four people are above a normal Body Mass Index, or BMI. While thousands of Yemeni children starve to death in the remnants of their homes, more Americans are tuning in to watch "Man vs. Food" than are watching news reports documenting their plight.
While it’s easy to ignore the suffering of other people’s worlds away, it is still important to recognize the widespread devastation in the developing world. More and more individuals are facing starvation every day in the developing world as a culture of excessive eating flourishes in the US Bearing this in mind, remember the phrase we heard as children, "Don’t waste food because elsewhere children are starving." Always remember how necessary it is to realize how much you have compared to so many others.
