Vijay Garg
In Indian culture, the welfare of all living beings has been talked about with the feeling of ‘Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah Sarve Santu Niramayaah Sarve Bhadraani Pashyantu Ma Kashchid Dukhbhag Bhavet’. The spirit of ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ accepts this entire Vasudha as a family. Our culture did not teach us to accept the ‘single’ in life, to value it or to move towards it, rather it worked to establish the ‘total’ in place of ‘single’. Our ancestors called ‘Vishti’ gave importance and priority to ‘community’ instead of ‘community’. Our sages taught that ‘I’ has no importance in this mortal world. Here, without ‘we’ nothing is going to happen in human life. Well, this statement is true that such noble spirit of humanity, such fluidity of values, simplicity and such cultural depth are not found in any other society, culture or religion of the world, whereas in our culture it is like the blood flowing in our arteries and is part of our heart. They are like the life stream. What is the reason behind this, but that the society which was concerned about the welfare of all living beings has today itself become so careless, helpless and irresponsible that it has no concern for the fear, hunger, yearning, pain, crisis around it. After all, how was it possible that in a society that serves food to others before oneself, crores of people of the country are still deprived of food .
According to the ‘Global Hunger Index 2023’, the level of hunger in India is serious with a score of 28.7 points. Recently two very important reports related to ‘food’ came from the United Nations. One of these is related to food wastage and the other is related to food shortage and starvation. It is noteworthy that it is the United Nations, giving more importance to the report on food wastage and publishing it first and releasing the report on food shortage i.e. starvation later. It is possible that the United Nations may not have even thought of this and the reason for these reports going back and forth may have been merely some technical barrier, hindrance or the functioning of the committees that prepare them, because there are many human, technical and mechanical aspects involved in the process of publishing reports. The fact is that food scarcity is somehow related to food wastage. Although there can be many other reasons for lack of food, but this problem starts with wastage of food, therefore, if food wastage is stopped 100 percent, then a large part of the problem of food lack will be solved.
The United Nations’ ‘Global Report on Food Crisis’ released at the end of April states that a total of sixty-nine countries around the world About 28.2 crore people are forced to remain hungry. According to the report, due to deteriorating food security situation in the war-torn Gaza Strip and Sudan, more than 24 million people could go hungry. It is noteworthy that the United Nations started issuing reports on food shortage in 2016. If you notice, in the latest report the number of hungry people has increased four times as compared to the first report. Also, this number of people suffering from hunger due to lack of food items is the highest till date. There could also be poverty and unemployment, which makes perfect sense in the Indian scenario of food scarcity and hunger.
While analyzing the problem of hunger, experts around the world have set a scale to understand hunger. According to Maximo Torero, economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there are a total of five phases. Among these, the people most suffering from hunger have been kept in the fifth phase, under which seventy lakh five thousand people from five countries including India have been included. Of these, eighty percent i.e. fifty-seven lakh seven thousand people are in the war-torn Gaza Strip alone.
It is noteworthy that according to the ‘Global Hunger Index 2023’, India has been ranked 111th in the list of 125 countries suffering from hunger. Just imagine that even after reaching the twenty-first century, our country is being identified as a country with people suffering from hunger, while on the other hand, we are parallel to all the developed countries of the world in carrying out all the cutting-edge scientific research and manufacturing defense equipment and various including export. Today our foreign policy, diplomacy, defense system and our democratic values, literary, cultural and artistic contributions are being accepted all over the world. We have become the fifth largest economy and we aim to become the third largest economy in the world within a few years.
The report of the ‘Food Waste Index 2024’ of the United Nations Environment Programme, a subordinate unit of the United Nations, released at the end of March, states that more grains are wasted than those who go to sleep hungry, in which hotels and restaurants play the biggest role. According to the report, in the year 2022, 19 percent of the total grain production globally i.e. about 1.05 billion tonnes of grains was wasted. According to the report, thirteen percent of the grain gets wasted in reaching the plate from the field.
Let us tell you that the Food Waste Index report of the United Nations Environment Program analyzes the progress of countries in reducing food waste by half by the year 2030. This report states that if food wastage is stopped, hunger can be eliminated from the world, because currently 783 million people in the world face severe hunger every day, while the food of one billion people is wasted. According to researchers, about 79 kilograms of food is wasted per person every year, which is equivalent to the plates of food wasted by at least one billion people worldwide every day. If seen, food wastage is a global tragedy, which is very important to be stopped, because this problem is not only global. Not only does it negatively impact the economy, it is also responsible for climate change and loss of biodiversity.
(The author is retired principal, educational columnist and can be reached at [email protected])
