There Are Children in Africa...

If you type "children in Africa" into a Google search you get images of hungry, starving, and diseased looking children, with their ribs protruding from their sun-stained skin, littering the results. You do the same thing again for America and you get children holding signs, but where are the ribs and thin arms?

We get images of  hungry African children on our screens because it makes us feel bad about ourselves and for the Global North we cannot think anything different other than the perceived view of what Africa is; hungry children. I complain about my phone not working and I'll hear the classic "there are children in Africa that are starving..." response and before you can reply with any truth they remove themselves from your presence.

You must ask yourself, do you really know why there are children anywhere who are starving? Are African children hungry because they are not growing enough food or are there other reasons? Raj Patel in Stuffed and Starved says "...recent starvation, mass-scale hunger and hunger-related deaths have not been triggered by an absence of appropriate crops... hunger is the result of a cluster of factors..." Our push to introduce genetically modified crops to Africa is not attacking the real issues that are happening in many of it's areas. War and conflict of resources, for instance, can be to blame for the starving children in Africa. We see the children and think it's simply that they do not have food, but instead we do not think about the possible lack of distribution of the food they do have. The impact of poverty is hardly ever accounted for, because it's a multi-prong problem most of us Global North are not ready to face. The food is there, a lot of people just cannot afford it. Adding genetically modified crops is not going to fix the problems of poverty, though I am not saying it's a bad idea to introduce them, but it will just give more food for poverty-stricken families to look at from a distance.