Can You See God in the Faces of the Hungry?

Natural disasters, lack of efficient food production, and demographic distribution of population can no longer be taken as sufficient explanations or excuses for this harsh reality. Due to increased production and the green revolution, it is generally acknowledged that more than enough food is produced each year to feed all of humanity. Today’s world hunger is primarily a human-made problem. It is a matter of distribution, transport, and will. Emergency food supplements such as Plumpy’nut and Meals Ready to Eat, the development of genetically modified seeds that increase food production, and a host of other scientific solutions make it possible to alleviate the problem of malnutrition in the short run and food scarcity in the long run. But these are only real solutions if they can be effectively placed in timely fashion into the hands and mouths of those who need them.
The reality is people keep people hungry—by choice or by apathy; by ideology, ignorance, or stubborn maintenance of cultural traps; for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways. At times, hunger is the unintended and unforeseen result of commercial or political decisions not well thought out; at other times, hunger is the goal of these decisions. Because hunger makes people passive, it is an effective strategy for silencing critical dissent.

Hunger is also an effective weapon. Local governments and political alliances, when it serves their ideologies or advantages, too often give their people “stones when they ask for bread and snakes when they ask for fish.” Massive stockpiles of food relief rot on docks because local governments do not allow them to be distributed to specific groups within their population for political reasons. Food relief is too often waylaid by corrupt officials and sold on the black market for profit rather than given to the people who truly need it. National leaders engage in land-redistribution plans or trade agreements that destroy the ability of local economies to feed their people, thereby increasing food insecurity by taking from them the ability to feed themselves, thus increasing their dependence on food relief and fomenting learned dependence, which strips people of hope.

In early 1942, in the face of the great tragedy of World War II, the American Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr caused a great stir by suggesting that the war was God’s judgment upon humanity, not as a punishment, but as the revelation that we as a human race were not living in harmony with the order of nature and truth established by God. His point was that in facing any human tragedy, the Christian should first ask what God is doing. Choices and actions of followers of Christ should be responses not to situations or selves, but to the activity of God in the world events around us. Any question about what we should do must be preceded by the question about what God is doing. That insight may serve us well today in dealing with the reality of world hunger.