Saturday 16 October 2010

World Food Day 2010

Nearly one billion people have less food than they need. That is, to put it another way, every seventh person on the planet is going hungry. Or to put it yet another way, thirty thousand people are starving to death every day. Those are the brutal in your face statistics. So what can we do about it? We have already seen that the usual suspects are not stepping up to the plate. We must all do something. Nobody else will.

Poet-in-Residence has signed the petition calling on the UN to do more. He has placed the words of Martin Luther King on his website. And he is going to write a poem. It's not much but at least it's something. And if everybody does something, it needn't be much, maybe we'll save a few lives. We can only try.

World Food Day

Get off these lands and politely split
For the Devil must plant more GM-shit,

And wave goodbye to your small canoe
Let's see what his factory ships can do,

The Devil don't need what we don't wrap
He controls the markets and we bag his crap.

The Poet is not so polite as the King
For a billion hungry is a hell of a thing.

-
gw2010

5 comments:

  1. thanks Poet...that just hits the nail again.I tried in the 70s to feed my family without buying from the global companies. Poor kids they said that they were raised on a brown diet! now we grow as much as we can and lo and behold so does the son, who was often the most verbal in opposition! I remember the feelings that I had when I went to Romania in the eary 90s and saw the shelves empty of goods. I couldn't bear to go to the big supermarkets for a long while after that.

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  2. How to help is a great dilemma and is not helped by the fact that some mogul in India has built an enormous palace overlooking the slums of Mumbai - but has eased his conscience by employing 600 people to look after it.
    Why is it that in countries where they are dying of starvation as I write there are also very rich people - and when we send help there are people who will intercept that help and channel it into ways of making even more money.
    I despair Gwilym -

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  3. Thank you Gerry and Pat. People, even in America are beginning to wake up to the fact that there are Orwellian forces at work who literally want to own all the patents to all our basic foodstuffs and so control what we eat, nothwithstanding that much of the flora and fauna is being lost, not to mention all the fruits of the the sea, and replaced with their own products such as GM modified salmon, etc. And all for profit and financial greed. Not to help the poor and the starving. The same Big Brother process is going on with the world's money, minerals, medicines and even whole countries. Can anything be done to remedy the situation? The real question is, have we left it too late? Near where I am, down the road in Hungary where 9 people have been kileed and 120 hospitalised and a 40 sq kms swathe of land and 3 villages have been made uninhabitable of thousands of fish have been destroyed by red sludge aluminium production's waste containing many toxins and 800 people were evacuated some 300 people are being brought back it would appear to restart the aluminium plant even though the storage facility and dam hasn't been properly repaired. The world needs its aluminium sugar drink cans etc.! Watch this space.

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  4. A poem well put, and would make a great song. Woody Guthrie would have loved this one.

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  5. Thanks for those kind words. Bring it on, Mike, Woody, Bob...

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