Unimaginable

Remember when that popular hamburger operation used to measure its success by the number of hamburgers sold? They numbered in the millions

Now we have a different kind of statistic.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization this week released the sad news that the number of hungry people in the world has reached the 1-billion mark. Here is an excerpt.

One in six people in the world — or more than 1 billion — is now hungry, a historic high due largely to the global economic crisis and stubbornly high food prices, a U.N. agency said Friday.

Compared with last year, there are 100 million more people who are hungry, meaning they receive fewer than 1,800 calories a day, the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report.

Almost all the world's undernourished live in developing countries, where food prices have fallen more slowly than in the richer nations, the report said. Poor countries need more aid and agricultural investment to cope, it said.

Read the entire article from the Associated Press

A normal response is to get mad and sad about it. It's very easy to shrug it off and go on with our comfortable lives. Another response is to give more money to our charity or relief organization. But we can also start to change the system that provides assistance, especially agriculture development. That check to Catholic Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief is going to provide that needed band-aid. But in the long run, efforts like reforming foreign aid offer an enduring solution.