HUNGER - North Korea

Politics using people as pawns.

"How sanctions, weather and a bad harvest have left North Koreans without enough to eat" PBS NewsHour 6/20/2019

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SUMMARY:  In North Korea, hunger is pervasive, and medical supplies are inadequate, in part because of U.S. and U.N. sanctions.  While China and South Korea are offering humanitarian assistance, U.S. officials fear aid would be usurped by the government rather than distributed among the people who need it.  But as Nick Schifrin reports, conditions in the world’s most isolated country are only worsening.

YEMEN - War Without Conscience

"Yemen’s spiraling hunger crisis is a man-made disaster" (Part 1) PBS NewsHour 7/2/2018

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SUMMARY:  One of the poorest countries in the Middle East, Yemen's war has pushed it to the brink of famine.  A Saudi blockade has slowed the flow of food and helped push prices up.  Markets and businesses are ruined from airstrikes.  Millions are destitute.  Special correspondent Jane Ferguson smuggled herself across front lines to report on what's happening inside the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

"American-made bombs in Yemen are killing civilians, destroying infrastructure and fueling anger at the U.S." (Part 2) PBS NewsHour 7/3/2018

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SUMMARY:  War rains down from the sky in Yemen, where an aerial bombing campaign by Saudi-led and American-backed coalition hammers much of the north.  The U.S. military supports the campaign against the Houthi rebels with logistics and intelligence, and sells the Saudis many of the bombs it drops on that country.  Special correspondent Jane Ferguson smuggled herself across front lines to report this series.

"Houthis deny U.S., Saudi claim that they are Iran’s puppets" (Part 3) PBS NewsHour 7/5/2018

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SUMMARY:  In the streets of Yemen’s capital Sana’a, chants of “Death to America” are loud and clear.  Houthi rebels, tied to Iran, seized the city and much of the north in 2014, causing Saudi Arabia to form a coalition, backed by the U.S., to defeat them.  The war has brought the country to its knees and driven bitter resentment, but hasn't pushed the Houthis back.  Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports.

ON THE EDGE - Venezuela's Food Crisis

"A growing, catastrophic food crisis sows unrest in Venezuela" PBS NewsHour 9/1/2016

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SUMMARY:  In Venezuela, hundreds of thousands came out in protest against President Nicolas Maduro, whose approval ratings have reached record lows.  The cause for discontent:  Food is now incredibly scarce and far too expensive to buy, and the hunger is leading to and caused by growing corruption.  Nathan Halverson of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting reports from Caracas.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  In Caracas, today, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans turned out to protest against President Nicolas Maduro's government and called for an end to his rule.

The country has been plagued by a deepening economic crisis, corruption, crime, all of which have contributed to a worsening food shortage.

Nathan Halverson of Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting recently visited Caracas,.

NATHAN HALVERSON, Center for Investigative Reporting:  Well before sunrise, hungry Venezuelans are waiting outside grocery stores praying for food trucks to arrive.  By mid-morning, with streets crowded with anxious faces, there is little hope.

WOMAN (through translator):  There is only butter and oil.  We need them to send us more food.

QUESTION (through translator):  When did you get here?

WOMAN (through translator):  At 4:00 a.m.

MAN (through translator):  I got here at 8:00 p.m. last night.

As Venezuelans watch their country crumble and their desperation and hunger spill into the streets, their anger with President Nicolas Maduro and his party has become explosive.

WOMAN (through translator):  This is what's happening in Venezuela.  We're starving.  We're struggling, thanks to this government.  It's the Maduro diet.

NATHAN HALVERSON:  Police now guard grocery stores across the country, holding back the hungry and volatile mobs.

MAN (through translator):  Why are you taking me out of line? I was here early.  I also need food.

NATHAN HALVERSON:  Some 90 percent of Venezuelans now report that food has become too expensive to buy.  Hungry mobs are increasingly rioting and looting bakeries and food trucks.  This has forced everyday people to try and calm desperate crowds, like this grocery store manager.

ENDING HUNGER - Daniel's Table

"Meet the couple on a mission to end hunger in their town" PBS NewsHour 8/22/2016

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SUMMARY:  The idea started at David and Alicia Blais' dinner table: what if they could end hunger in their town?  Their traveling trailer delivers meals to 200-300 people a night, motivated by the memory of their son, Daniel.  Special correspondent Tina Martin of WGBH reports from Framingham, Massachusetts.

EDUCATION - Food For Thought, Schoolchildren's Hunger

"Op-Ed:  No excuse for dismissing high-achieving schoolchildren's hunger" by Garret Keizer, Los Angeles Times 9/27/2014

In the fall of 2010, after a 14-year hiatus from the classroom, I began a one-year job filling in for a teacher on leave from the same rural Vermont high school that I'd entered as a rookie 30 years before.

Almost from my first day, I was moved by the sight of what had always been a good school straining to be a better one.  Multiple tutoring centers did a brisk business at every period and not infrequently after the buses had gone for the day.  Hardly a week went by when teachers were not summoned to an early-morning meeting to discuss an individual student's progress.  Study halls no longer functioned as de facto prep periods for their faculty minders or as down-time for sleepy kids.  Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the boy who woke at 2 in the morning to do his barn chores no longer had a place to lay his head.

By all official measures, the school was succeeding.  Ranked as the state's poorest on the basis of the number of its students eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, Lake Region Union High School was outperforming many of its more affluent competitors on standardized tests.  The year before I returned, its writing scores were the highest in the state.  The next year, the free-and-reduced-lunch students performed above the state average in reading, writing, math and science on the New England Common Assessment Program exams.

I threw myself into the mission with as much gusto as a man can summon in late middle age.  I did my best to coach for the NECAPs — yes, we took time away from our lesson plans to do some teaching to the test — and resolved to keep my skepticism about the ultimate value of the tests to myself.  There were good reasons for doing so.  I knew that voters in the community were likelier to approve the school budget if the tests results were good.  I also knew that some of the kids I coached and cajoled would go on to surmount the social conditions that stood in their way.  I knew this because a few of them always had.

But I also knew the school's sincere efforts were in the service of a cynical agenda.  The battle cry of the school reform movement, that “poverty should never be an excuse for poor academic achievement,” all too often masks the blithe conviction that good academic achievement can serve as an excuse for poverty.  As long as the test scores are at par, you see, we need not be overly concerned if the pantries are bare, the parents jobless or jailed, and the gap between rich and poor more appalling than it's been since 1928.

In the same county where Lake Region is achieving its impressive test results, an estimated 1 in 4 children is “food insecure.”  It's a phrase that tries the imaginations of those who have the luxury of spicing their security with complaint.  “What to cook for dinner, always such a dilemma.”  Imagine waking up in a state of food insecurity and going to school to take a standardized test.  Imagine how ashamed you'll feel if your school is judged to be failing because of you.

Not to worry, though, because the hunger goes away just as soon as you've performed at grade level or are enrolled in an Advanced Placement course.  And within a few short years, you'll be getting the math right when you divvy up your welfare check after your job at the furniture mill has been outsourced or the family farm auctioned off.

In one of my classes was a girl who'd been rescued the previous winter from an unheated trailer behind her grandparents' house.  She was a tough and determined kid, intelligent, ready to seek extra help, not afraid to speak out in class, almost never behind in her homework.  I happen not to know her standardized test scores, but it's reasonable to assume that her better-than-average application resulted in a performance that was at least on a par with the better-than-average test scores of her school.  It is far less reasonable to assume that those test scores significantly improved her lot.  They certainly didn't improve her grandparents' lot.  They did nothing to allay the economic conditions that made her every achievement in school outrageously more difficult for her than it had to be.

No matter how dedicated, teachers alone cannot change conditions that will take nothing short of a revolution to change.  I didn't have to teach for a year in a “high-performing” rural high school to recognize the obscenity of using “failing schools” to ignore the implications of a broken democracy.  Or to recognize the moral futility of being charged with the task of creating “a level playing field” so that society can sort its winners and losers with a clearer conscience and a colder eye.

Of course, I can bear witness to the impressive academic achievements of students from impoverished backgrounds.  So can many other teachers, and they should.  To withhold one's applause for the sake of advocating broader social progress is to insult those students and their struggles.  It is also to forfeit what may be our best challenge to a society of mounting inequality.

After all, if food-insecure 16-year-olds can master a prescribed curriculum, then what is the excuse of the richest nation in the world for failing to master the common core of a livable wage, a color-blind legal system and a society in which the word “class” refers to a course you take and not to chances you never had?

HUNGER IN AMERICA - Who's Getting Emergency Food Assistance

"More emergency food assistance going to working Americans, study finds" PBS NewsHour 8/18/2014

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JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  That report by the nonprofit group Feeding America found that roughly one in seven people in the country, 46 million people, rely on food banks or other charitable organizations for basic nutrition.  They included some 620,000 military households and an increased number of adult college students.

Food bank clients come from all demographic groups, in suburbs, as well as urban areas.  And many report facing the choice between buying food and paying for utilities, rent, medicine and other necessities.

Joining us is Deborah Flateman.  She’s the executive director of the MARYLAND FOOD BANK and a board member of Feeding America.

Welcome to you.

DEBORAH FLATEMAN, President & CEO, Maryland Food Bank:  Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN:  On a general level first, what do we learn from this report about who is hungry in America?

DEBORAH FLATEMAN:  You know, honestly, from my point of view, it verifies what we have been seeing trending over the past few years.  I think one of the most significant pieces of data tells us that more than half of the people who are accessing food through the emergency feeding system, including food banks and food shelves, are people who are working.

GITMO - Another Hunger Strike by Prisoners

Too bad politics kept President Obama from closing Gitmo.

"Guantanamo Bay Hunger Strike Grows as More Than Half of Prisoners Refuse Food" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 4/22/2013

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  And we turn now to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where a protest by prisoners continues to grow.

Ray Suarez reports.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour):  More than half the detainees at the Guantanamo prison are now on hunger strike.  Government figures disclosed this weekend show 84 of the 166 captives at the facility are now participating.  A smaller number began the protest in early February.  They objected to their living conditions and to alleged mishandling of the Koran by military guards.

They also cited the legal limbo many have been held in for a decade or more, not charged with crimes or placed on trial.  On April 13th, there was a brief, violent confrontation.  The military said guards raided a communal area to uncover security cameras and windows that had been shrouded for weeks.

COL. JOHN BOGDAN, COMMANDER, Guantanamo Bay Joint Detention Group:  We were trying to be patient and work with them, give them the opportunity to comply.  We hit the point where, you know, I felt we were accepting too much risk and it was time to take action.

RAY SUAREZ:  The guards say the prisoners attacked them with homemade weapons.  There were no reported serious injuries, but the prison was put on lockdown, and the number of hunger strikers skyrocketed; 16 are being force-fed, with tubes inserted through the nose and into the stomach.  They are typically shackled in chairs like this for the procedure.

An American Naval medical officer described the process in 2009.

MAN:  These are the feeding tubes that we use whenever it is determined at a very high level that somebody has reached that point in the hunger striking.  Everyone is allowed to hunger strike; that is their right to protest.  But if somebody gets to that point where they need additional medical care or it's reached the point where it's threatening their life, that's where the decision is made way above me to step in.

RAY SUAREZ:  Among those being force-fed is Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel of Yemen.  In a recent New York Times op-ed transmitted to his lawyers through an interpreter, he wrote:  "I've been detained at Guantanamo for 11 years and three months.  I have never been charged with any crime.  I have never received a trial."

In all, 86 men remain at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release from the facility, 56 without restrictions, another 30 with conditions, all this despite the fact President Obama signed an executive order to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, more than four years ago.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  And promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo.

RAY SUAREZ:  But Congress has blocked the transfer of any detainees to the mainland U.S.  And some, like the Yemeni Moqbel, are men without countries.  Their native nations have refused to take them back.

Several high-level al-Qaida detainees, like 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are among the few facing military trial at the prison.

"Does Force-feeding Guantanamo Prisoners on Hunger Strike Violate Their Rights?" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 4/22/2013

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SUMMARY:  Over half of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay Prison are refusing to eat, protesting the length of their detention, legal limbo and quality of life.  Ray Suarez talks with Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald about the origins of the protest and the question of self-determination when it comes to the prisoners' hunger strike.

AMERICA - 'A Place at the Table' Hunger in the USA

"New Documentary Puts Homegrown Issue of Hunger on the Table" PBS Newshour 3/1/2013

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SUMMARY:  Although the United States is the largest producer of food per capita in the world, that food is not reaching the plates of millions of children in America.  Hunger is the subject of the new documentary, "A Place at the Table."  Ray Suarez talks with co-director Lori Silverbush about our homegrown problem.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour):  It's a bitter paradox.  The United States produces more food per person than any other country in the world, but still has a major problem with hunger, a hardship that only grew worse during the recession and its aftermath.

The government estimates some 50 million people are living with food insecurity, meaning they don't always have adequate nutrition for an active and healthy life.  A new documentary called "A Place at the Table" challenges the viewers' assumptions about who is hungry and why.

Here's an excerpt.