By Danielle Jolicoeur
We are now one week and two days removed from the culmination of a very long, very intense presidential campaign. Through every disputed platform, at every point of debate, Senators McCain and Obama made sure to hit the big ones: the economy; foreign policy and national security; energy independence; health care; education; and the list continues. We may have been captivated by their shiny rhetoric and momentarily blinded by the media's dramatic cries of the looming apocalypse, but I would hope - no, expect - that many Americans sensed something important was missing from the candidates' promises and platforms. Please correct me if I am mistaken, but nowhere in the three presidential debates, one vice presidential debate, or numerous TV interviews did Senators McCain and Obama address the OTHER global crisis that is, according to the World Bank, currently threatening to push 100 million people into extreme poverty. Never did I hear them mention the over 850 million people living on less than $1.25 a day, or the fact that a child dies of hunger every 5 seconds, according to figures of the UN Food and Agriculture Association and Bread for the World. Granted, the job of the president is to lead and protect the United States, not save the starving children in Haiti. Still, in my eyes it's indisputable that as one of the most powerful countries in the world, the U.S. has a huge ethical responsibility to foster an environment that satisfies the most basic of human rights. Now I don't mean to say that the U.S. is totally neglecting its duties here; actually, President Bush did OK in this area. But what about the U.S.'s commitment in 2000, along with other countries, to cut in half the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015? Never once in my memory did I hear either of the candidates mention any of these 8 Millennium Development Goals of which we are drastically far from reaching. The next president of the United States may have a full schedule of very serious issues to deal with, but with the cost of food having increased more than 43 percent in the past year, according to the United States Agency for International Development, he will also have to address how our country can most effectively respond to a burgeoning world population whose adequate nourishment is greatly affected by our foreign aid policy. Consider this: the Foreign Assistance Act - our current foreign aid program- is the same one created back in 1961, originally intended to curb the spread of communism. Not only has it not been comprehensively reauthorized since 1985, but today the FAA is run out of 12 departments, 25 different agencies and 60 government offices, with the Department of Defense managing a whopping 25 percent. Foreign aid is without a doubt a critical foreign policy tool in our increasingly globalized economy, and with a quarter of our aid married to a political agenda for war and protection, there is significant need to reassess our necessity for Poverty Focused Development Assistance. Not only is it a matter of national security to have a stable, fed developing world, but we have a moral responsibility to devote more of our efforts to it and to refocus our foreign assistance to make developmental aid more effective. There is enough food produced to feed every single human being on this planet, yet According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States throws away about 96 billion pounds of food each year. Next week is Hunger Awareness Week on the UP campus, and students will have the opportunity to learn more about a fundamental disparity that has faced every single president in our nation's history, but that still earns too little attention. We are blessed to have enough to eat every day; to have the luxury of making choices between courses at meals and not between what meals to sacrifice. I encourage all students to take the initiative this coming week to learn more by participating in the events on campus. We may not be able to completely eradicate world hunger, but we can make a significant difference in the current direction. And in the wake of a campaign built on "change," I believe our voices and actions will resonate with the next administration.
