Word: hungers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nearly half a billion people are suffering from some form of hunger; 10,000 of them die of starvation each week in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are all too familiar severe shortages of food in the sub-Saharan Sahelian countries of Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta and Niger; also in Ethiopia, northeastern Brazil, India and Bangladesh. India alone needs 8 to 10 million tons of food this year from outside sources, or else as many as 30 million people might starve...
Starvation is only one of the ways in which hunger kills. People whose bellies are full can still die of malnutrition if their diets lack certain essential elements. Lack of the proteins containing essential amino acids-found in milk, meat, fish, beans and nuts-can bring on kwashiorkor, a wasting disease that kills tens of thousands of children each year in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and parts of South America. Kwashiorkor victims, whose tissues are usually swollen with fluid, develop a scaly rash and liver troubles. They are most easily recognized by the characteristic that gave the disease its Ghanaian...
Most adults can come close to starvation and survive. Hunger strikers and concentration-camp inmates have been pulled back from the brink of death with carefully measured supplements of essential nutrients. Though survivors of concentration camps tend to die sooner than their contemporaries, their deaths-or health problems-are rarely a direct result of near starvation, but are caused by old injuries or tuberculosis and other infections...
...cannot take place in the fetus if the mother is malnourished, and it cannot be accomplished in the infant if he is starving. Nor will it happen later. In many cases, brain development that does not occur when it is supposed to does not take place at all. Thus hunger is condemning countless thousands of infants-from Harlem to the Sahel-to the twilight zone of mental retardation, and leaving them no hope of deliverance...
...world's food supply were evenly divided among the planet's inhabitants, hunger might be curbed for several decades. But it is not likely that wealthy nations will reduce their living standards to help the L.D.C.s. For example, Americans will not eagerly reduce the 1.3 million tons of fertilizer they spread each year on lawns, golf courses and cemeteries; that amount would produce enough extra grain in the L.D.C.s to feed about 65 million people...