The next time your mom or dad tells you to eat your vegetables because there are people hungry around the world, you might not want to dismiss them.
They’re right.
As President Nicolas Maduro stages the biggest military drills in Venezuela’s history, and steadfastly maintains a border blockade that is stopping humanitarian aid from entering the country, thousands of children are wasting away and starving to death.
Siobhan Collingwood said children are arriving at school with empty lunchboxes
Children are arriving at a school so hungry they are searching the bins for food, its head teacher has said.
A cross-party group of MPs has called on the government to appoint a Minister for Hunger to deal with “food insecurity” especially among children.
Siobhan Collingwood, head teacher of the school in Morecambe, Lancashire, said one in 10 of its pupils came from families using foodbanks.
“Unfortunately I’ve got the faces behind the statistics,” she added.
More than six in 10 children globally lack access to social protection, leaving them particularly vulnerable to falling into chronic poverty, the UN said on Wednesday, warning also that some governments are cutting State cash entitlements, amid continuing economic uncertainty.
In a joint report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), data shows that although a welfare safety net exists for 35 per cent of youngsters overall, that figure drops to 28 per cent in Asia and just 16 per cent in Africa.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that about 1.7 million children under the age of five die as a result of environmental pollution every year. These conditions have been analyzed and found to result not only from pollution incidences and accidents, but also from long periods of oblivious exposure to the toxic substances released during the accidents. The Minamata, Bhopal and Chernobyl disasters are examples of accidents that still exert fatal consequences on their respective environments.