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About 15.6 million household in America had to worry about their next meal because of money in 2016, more than 12 percent of the population. Due to President Trump wanting to secure food stamps, millions of families could not receive food stamps for the government to support their families. The US is a wealth country we have food stamps and welfare for poeple with food insecurity and hunger. The US government major problem is hunger but they seem to not care for their citizens. People think hunger is a hoax and is making thre problem worst.

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A whopping 15.6 million American households experienced at least some food insecurity in 2016, meaning that more than 12 percent of the population did not always know when or how they would get their next meal. Despite this, Congress is debating making it even harder for the hungry to access government assistance. The House farm bill included revisions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's (SNAP) work requirements, adding more bureaucratic hurdles and decreasing available exemptions. President Trump supports the provision, signaling that as the House and Senate reconcile their farm bills the issue may become a sticking point.

Why would such a wealthy nation not only allow hunger to persist, but even put forward policies likely to exacerbate it? The answer rests in part in a misconceptualization of hunger. Paternalistic rhetoric about the importance of work in qualifying someone to receive governmental aid forgets the very reason we have food-based welfare in the first place - hunger and food insecurity - and strikes a blow against SNAP's purpose. This rhetoric transforms the food choices and physical bodies of SNAP users into markers of how undeserving recipients are, implicitly asserting that starvation-level hunger is the only legitimate kind of hunger, and that it doesn't exist in the United States. The end result is more hungry Americans.

The first permanent food stamp program was enacted in 1964 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. While this was a major step toward addressing hunger in prosperous postwar times, it did not fully meet low-income Americans' nutrition needs. States retained the power to determine who should access the program, and recipients needed to pay upfront before they could access their food aid.

The power of states to limit recipients left some Americans hungry. White Southern conservatives ran stingy programs out of a combination of racism, retaliation over Civil Rights gains and a desire to maintain the economic and political status quo. As NAACP lawyer Marian Wright testified, the difficulty that Black Mississippians had obtaining food stamps was "a way of ensuring cheap, desperate laborers who would be available for seasonal agricultural labor."

When advocates challenged conservative Southern Democrats on their bigotry and stinginess, the conservatives rarely even bothered to deny the discrimination. Instead, they questioned the entire premise that Americans could be hungry. When Senator Robert Kennedy "discovered poverty," including children with distended and bloated bellies, during his 1967 tour of Mississippi, that state's governor, Paul Johnson dismissed these findings out of hand, countering that "Nobody is starving in Mississippi. The nigra women I see are so fat they shine."

It was not only politicians who struggled with the idea Americans could be so poor they were actually hungry. A 1968 CBS News special, Hunger in America depicted the issues of hunger plaguing vast swaths of America. A Navajo doctor told the camera about the physical deficits of American Indian children living on reservations. The program showed underweight children, including a dying infant.

But instead of catalyzing a unified push to eradicate hunger, the special divided Americans.

Some viewers found the program infuriating - not because of disturbing images of starvation and hunger - but over the dissemination of what they saw as "liberal propaganda." In a letter to the Department of Agriculture, one woman described the show as a "poverty hoax," and said that "it is tragic" that Americans are so gullible they will "swallow such nonsense that 10 million people is on starvation in this country." Americans could not be starving hungry, even if they were poor, she insisted, and if people believed otherwise they were being duped.

By contrast, other viewers found themselves aghast over the images themselves. Another letter writer to the Department of Agriculture explained that he did not want to believe this kind of hunger could be real, but "with the vision of child after child showing the scars of malnutrition it seemed to me that [the Department of Agriculture] has some explaining to do."

Why such a divided response? Because of the same persistent doubts that hunger existed in America - and the ability to find what seemed to be evidence to support them. After all, didn't images of obese, impoverished Americans challenge any notion of hunger plaguing the country?

At the root of this debate were differences over what constituted hunger and malnutrition in the United States and what caused them - regardless of their manifestations. To anti-hunger activists, for example, obesity among impoverished Americans stemmed from poor diets full of cheap commodities lacking nutrition - reinforcing their perceptions of a societal problem over hunger and nutrition.

But a doctor writing to the House Agriculture Committee in 1968 disagreed as to what caused this obesity. To him, high-calorie commodities provided food and an opportunity for people "to put in a good hard twelve hours in the sun on a handle of a hoe or shovel." He argued that the food wasn't to blame. It was the laziness of welfare recipients who lacked motivation to "work it off as fast as he takes it in."

To such skeptics, it didn't much matter whether the malnourished were obese or had ribs showing, the real issue was one of personal responsibility - and amid the divisive political environment of the late 1960s, conservatives increasingly agreed with this rationale. And so, they pointed to images of hungry or malnourished and obese Americans as evidence of poor individual choices, not evidence of a larger problem with the American economic system.

Questions about deservingness of the poor have persisted to the present and shaped the battles over food stamps as they have evolved over the past 54 years. Healthful, nutritional eating can be expensive, but many politicians ignore this reality and instead blame welfare recipients for "choosing" an unhealthy lifestyle over a healthy one.

And so, the solution has been to decrease the number of Americans with access to food welfare, even as food insecurity itself has not decreased. Rather than ensuring no one is hungry in this nation, we simply insist that real hunger does not exist. As conservatives downplay the seriousness of domestic hunger, describing the supposedly "lobster-eating" poor, as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) did recently, they make space for debates over work requirements instead of over basic health needs.

Earlier this year, President Trump proposed a "Harvest Box" modeled off the meal service Blue Apron that would dictate what SNAP recipients ate. Like many who criticize the consumption habits of SNAP clients, the idea was to cut out access to junk food and other "frivolous" items. Trump's administration reasoned that if impoverished Americans were truly hungry, they would accept whatever they were given.

In our fast-paced news cycle the "Harvest Box" quickly got replaced by the more attainable goal of tightening SNAP work requirements. Once again, the conversation focused on individual choice: in this case forcing individuals to fulfill certain work requirements that would purportedly allow them to take command of their lives.

But in reality the new proposal merely makes it more difficult for individuals to access the very resources that will help them avoid hunger. Those with uneven work hours will struggle to fulfill the requirements and those entitled to an exemption may be unable to navigate the bureaucracy needed to get it.

And so, once again, policymakers are ignoring the reality of hunger and starvation that plagues 15.6 million Americans, dismissing their obligation to help them and instead turning to politically potent rhetoric about individual responsibility that taps into a long-held distrust of claims of hunger in the U.S.

The result of this catastrophic mistake is that millions of Americans are still hungry. By refusing to frame the farm bill debate over SNAP in terms of this hunger, we are en route to making the problem even worse.

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Perspective | Why American policy is leaving millions hungry

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A whopping 15.6 million American households experienced at least some food insecurity in 2016, meaning that more than 12 percent of the population did not always know when or how they would get their next meal. Despite this, Congress is debating making it even harder for the hungry to access government assistance.

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Harold Copping, Feeding The Five Thousand, 1920,Religious Tract Society Location.

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Detergent with the wrong ingredients can poison fresh water. Chemicals in the detergent are easily swallowed by fish and other types of sea creatures which is extremely concerning due to how strong the toxins are. This can kill a tremendous amount of sea animals. The main ingredient that leads to this is called sodium silicate solution and surfactants, the rest of the ingredients actually don’t cause very much damage. Check your detergent for these ingredients and if you do have them, switch immediately for the sake of healthy clean water. Detergents you can switch to are, Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day Laundry Detergent, Tide PurClean, Method 8X Free & Clear Laundry Detergent, Common Good Bergamot and many more.

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- Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives.
Over the past couple decades, a plethora of eco-friendly laundry detergents have bubbled up out of the suds, promising to clean your clothes without harming the environment.

But with so many green labels promising plant-based this and carbon-offset that, it can be hard to separate facts from marketing-speak. That's why we cut through the greenwash and put eco-friendly detergents to the test at our laundry labs in Cambridge, MA.

We spent three weeks evaluating ten of the most popular soaps-from plant-based soap nuts to "hybrid" liquid detergents-on how well they remove stains, how affordable they are, how transparent they are about the ingredients they contain, and how many plant-based ingredients they include.

But before we get into the results, it's important to acknowledge that there's no such thing as a perfectly "green" detergent. For instance, the harvesting and processing of some plant-based ingredients has a greater overall carbon footprint than traditional, petroleum-derived alternatives. And some detergents may be all-natural, but don't get clothes very clean.

With those caveats in mind, here are the best eco-friendly detergents you can buy-and a few you should avoid.

Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day Laundry Detergent (Best Overall)

It turns out that Thelma A. Meyer-the real person behind Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day cleaning products-really knows her stuff. The liquid laundry detergent that bears her name is our overall favorite, because it cleans 96 percent as well as regular Tide, and 97 percent of its ingredients are derived from plants.

It's also more cost-effective than traditional detergent. Although it's more expensive per bottle, Mrs. Meyer's only costs 23 cents per load, while regular Tide is going to run you around 28 cents a load.

The only thing our testers didn't love about Mrs. Meyer's is the scent it left on laundry. Some of our reviewers were fans of the lemon verbena scent, but others thought it smelled like citrusy shampoo. You may prefer one of the seven other scents, but you won't find a perfume-free option.
Where to Buy:
Tide PurClean (Best Cleaning)

Tide PurClean is a brand-new detergent with a familiar name and a reduced environmental impact. It claims to clean as well as conventional Tide, and our tests proved that claim to be 100 percent true. In fact, it's far and away the best-cleaning eco-friendly detergent we tested.

However, there are two drawbacks: cost and content. We found a 32-load bottle of PurClean Walmart for $9.99, which means each load of laundry will cost you 32 cents-more than most of the other detergents we tested.

PurClean could also be described as a hybrid detergent-only 65 percent of its ingredients are plant-based, and some of the rest are petroleum-derived. Compared to Mrs. Meyers and Seventh Generation-each 97 percent plant-derived-it's less green. But if you don't want to sacrifice performance and want to do Mother Earth a small favor, PurClean is the best choice for clean laundry.
Where to Buy:
Method 8X Free & Clear Laundry Detergent

We really liked the no-mess bottle Method's ultra-concentrated detergent came in. You just aim the nozzle at your washer's detergent dispenser, press the pump four times, and you're good to go. By design, it keeps you from overusing detergent; that's good, because overused detrgent can build up on clothes and make colors look dingy.

In terms of stain removal, this ethanol-based detergent came in third. On the eco-friendliness front, 85 percent of the listed ingredients are plant-based and biodegradable. On the downside, Method is a little pricey at 30 cents a wash-higher than many leading detergents. If you're prone to using too much, however, the bottle's unique design may end up saving you money in the long run.
Where to Buy:
Method 4x Concentrated Laundry Detergent

If Method's 8X detergent is too expensive, the 4X formula might seem like a better idea. It's 30 percent cheaper, costing between 20-23 cents per load. But you'll lose the no mess pump bottle and some stain removal power. That's because the 8X primarily uses ethanol, while the less-concentrated 4X lists water as its first ingredient. This change in the formula translates to only a four percent difference in the amount of stains removed, but in the detergent world, it's a war of inches.

Even though a less-concentrated detergent wastes energy in the shipping process by moving water, at least 4X is somewhat environmentally sound. By our count, nearly all of the contents in the bottle are either biodegradable or plant derived. Even the container itself is made from 100 percent recycled plastic.
Where to Buy:
Common Good Bergamot

Common Good detergent is unique in that it relies on refill stations located throughout the country. This means you can reuse the recyclable bottle over and over again. The detergent itself is made from 100 percent biodegradable compounds.

On the cleaning front, Common Good was on the weaker side, leaving behind eight percent more stains than regular Tide. Also, at 35 cents a load, it's pretty expensive-especially if you have to go out of your way to refill it.
Where to Buy:
Seventh Generation Free & Clear Laundry Detergent

Seventh Generation is one of the most popular brands for eco-friendly products, also known for its tissues, paper towels, and diapers. In our testing, the company's Free and Clear detergent provided a comparable clean to conventional detergents. On top of that, it's popular for its lack of perfumes and dyes, and its many trusted certifications. It meets the EPA Safer Product Standard and is USDA certified to be 97 percent plant-based. It's even kosher.

But as powerful and eco-friendly as Free and Clear is, it's also pricier than the competition. We paid around $13 for 50 ounces, which works out to around 33 cents a wash. If you have sensitive skin or want an unscented option, it's still a good choice.
Where to Buy:
Green Works

Green Works is Clorox's foray into the eco-friendly detergent market. Among the big brand-name detergents we tested, Green Works was one of the most affordable-the bottle we tested cost about 19 cents a load. Not only is it inexpensive, but 96 percent of its formula is derived from what Clorox calls "natural sources" which it helpfully lists on its website.

That's great, but in our stain removal tests, Green Works landed right in the murky world between acceptable and better-than-average cleaning. Ultimately, we think its most compelling asset is its low price.
Where to Buy:
Biokleen Laundry Liquid

Biokleen touts its Citrus Essence Laundry Liquid as 100 percent plant-based, and its citrus-scent is like a tall glass of Florida orange juice. Most of our reviewers loved both the scent and the price: just 11 cents per load.

However, in our stain removal tests it couldn't stand up to the best "green" suds or traditional detergents that use harsher chemicals. It had a particularly tough time with grease stains. That being said, it's important to remember that most clothes just aren't that dirty. If you work in agriculture or construction, you might want to steer clear, but this could be a fine choice for folks who just need to spruce up their laundry and enjoy smelling like oranges.
Where to Buy:
GreenShield Organic

Every bottle of GreenShield laundry soap is stamped with a big USDA organic sticker, but that's about all that this one has going for it.

Stain removal left a lot to be desired, falling a full 10 percent behind conventional Tide. That's likely because GreenShield relies on soapberries rather than a synthetic surfactant. Our reviewers also agreed across the board that GreenShield has an off-putting scent. Overall, this product did not impress us.
Where to Buy:
Charlie's Soap

Charlie's soap-the only powdered detergent in our roundup-came third-to-last in the overall rankings. We think it's is a great alternative for cleaning clothes in the great outdoors-think extended camping trips-but far from the best bet for your laundry room.

At 20 cents a load, it wasn't the cheapest we tested, and it had real trouble removing any of the stains it faced. But to be fair, we skipped some of Charlie's more onerous suggestions, like pretreating laundry overnight with in a water-and-detergent-filled bucket.
Where to Buy:
Boulder Clean

Look at the ingredient list for Boulder Clean Natural Laundry Detergent and you'll see just ten items. It's made of things like citrus oil and salt. The only compound we found suspect was methylisothiazolinone, a synthetic preservative. While it's found in many mouthwashes and cosmetic products, there is a concern that it may lead to contact dermatitis in individuals who are allergic.

While Boulder Clean is weaker than regular Tide, at only 15 cents a wash it's way more cost effective. It's a good trade off since this detergent uses no artificial perfumes-it just smells refreshing.
Where to Buy:
Ecos Free & Clear (Avoid)

Although popular on Amazon, Ecos Free and Clear was the weakest of the liquid detergents we tested, struggling to remove every kind of stain. On the plus side, it contains coconut oil, so it smells pretty good.

But a good smell and built-in fabric softener weren't enough to win us over. Our verdict? Skip Ecos in favor of something else.
Where to Buy:
Eco Nuts (Avoid)

Popularized on Shark Tank, Eco Nuts are about as natural as a detergent can be. Each box is full of dried soapberries, which contain a soap-like substance that foams up in the wash. They're also reusable and exceptionally affordable.

Unfortunately, they don't clean as well as other detergents, leaving 15% more stains behind than Tide. In fact, they were pretty much obliterated by all the other detergents we used.
Where to Buy:
How We Tested

To test stain removal, we pitted all detergents against standardized cloth test strips coated with carbon, body oils, blood, cocoa, and red wine. We put them through a Normal cycle in the Whirlpool WFW90HEFW front-load washer-along with eight pounds of towels, pillowcases, and sheets-closely following each manufacturer's instructions for a medium load.

After waiting 12 hours for the stain strips to dry in a dark room, we used a piece of lab equipment called a photospectrometer to determine exactly how much of each stain had been lifted.

For more information about our testing process, read our in-depth explainer.

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2p3EOxo

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The best eco-friendly laundry detergents of 2017

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Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives.

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Every year there are million of students, about 1 in 6 students suffer from hunger. As a result of hunger they are malnourished and unable to concentrate in school. Feeding America feeds about 12 million kid with food drives nationally.

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How Hunger Affects Learning | Feeding America

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Hunger can make a big impact on a child's ability to perform in school.

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Organizations that provide the people in need with food. 💓

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Organizations that provide the people in need with food. 💓

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The Bay Area is tragically filled with hundreds of homeless people because of how expensive housing is here, as well as many who do have a house but not enough money to provide for their family. Though the cost of living here has not decreased, there are many organizations willing to help provide food to make life a little easier for those who are in need of help. Places such as Glide which provides meals daily in their dining room and Foods not Bombs, an organization that makes meals to give out at the park. These however are just in the Bay Area, Action Against Hunger is one of the biggest organizations that provide homeless people and struggling families with healthy food all around the world.

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Action Against Hunger | Ending World Hunger & Malnutrition

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More than two million children die from hunger each year. Action Against Hunger works in more than 50 countries to save lives and help children grow strong. We lead the global movement to end hunger. We innovate solutions, advocate for change, and reach 24 million people every year with proven hunger prevention and treatment programs. As a nonprofit that works across 50 countries, our 8,300 dedicated staff members partner with communities to address the root causes of hunger, including conflict, inequity, and emergencies. We strive to create a world free from hunger, for everyone, for good.

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Does the government think of solving hunger as a top priority?

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Does the government think of solving hunger as a top priority?

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No. Not at all. Our government only focuses on what will benefit America, not what will benefit the Americans. World hunger has been a touchy subject that has appeared on poster boards, website ads, news broadcasts but still our government has yet to try to fix this terrible issue. If effort was put into this situation, we would be decreasing in the number of starving families, not just in America but the entire world. Though this feels like a hopeless wish, organizations are still trying to bring more awareness and shed light on real world problems. Proclaiming that problems that don’t affect you are still problems that need to be dealt with. For more information about the topic, click this website link.

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(June 2002) Efforts to address world hunger are not faring well.

Progress since the World Food Conference in 1974 has been disappointing.

Although the percentage of malnourished (underweight) children has declined, modestly, in most countries in the intervening 25 years, their numbers continue to rise.

The data suggest an ongoing race between socioeconomic development and population growth, compounded by an increasingly vulnerable resource base and the fact that, more often than not, the fruits of development have yet to reach millions of people in a manner sufficient to overcome their caloric deficits. Policies and programs explicitly designed to reduce hunger have done so only marginally in most instances, implying that they have not adequately removed the underlying constraints causing hunger in the first place.

Moreover, despite two major international meetings this decade, one on nutrition (ICN, Rome, 1992) and the other on hunger itself (World Food Summit, Rome, 1996), there are few grounds for confidence as we look ahead.

What is the problem? And what can we do about it?

This essay briefly examines hunger as a political issue and then focuses on two key operational problems: defining a hunger agenda, and the related problem of organizing to carry it out. The hunger dilemma is both conceptual and organizational, and it is not easily circumvented. The dilemma leaves hunger ill-targeted and hunger professionals often frustrated by the constraints they face in trying to erode the constraints to nutritional adequacy experienced by the hungry themselves.
Photo: Office of Rep.Tony Hall (D-Ohio)
Political Jekyll and Hyde

One might think that hunger would be an easy issue for governments, international agencies, and even universities to embrace.

Nobody actually favors the existence of hunger, except occasionally as a weapon of war. Most would agree that hunger is undesirable and that its prevalence in the world connotes something wrong that should be addressed. And, indeed, leaders as diverse as Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ferdinand Marcos have exploited the rhetorical appeal of hunger as an issue, confident that it symbolizes what they oppose and that their people's ethical, humanitarian, and political beliefs will reward them for pledging to rectify the situation.

Moreover, hunger's political appeal has been strengthened by evidence that protein-energy malnutrition (PEM), the essence of hunger (see Box 1), constrains human competence, productivity, and potential, making it a legitimate issue in development, as well.

Hunger, it would seem, has all the advantages of being "big," non-contentious, politically appealing, and- for the development community- professionally respectable, even compelling.

If only it were so simple.

Unfortunately, the hunger issue contains several liabilities that have proven to be problematic.

Endemic hunger is mostly invisible; its victims are typically peripheral and voiceless; and, rhetoric notwithstanding, political salience is usually low.

Moreover, hunger advocates labor in a cluttered policy environment. Most of them have few links to the people for whom they advocate, and their lofty appeals are seldom matched by political mobilization and demands by the hungry on their own behalf.

The hard fact of the matter is that hunger policies are seldom seen as a collective good. They tend to be divisible, even redistributive in their benefits, and hence contentious in nature, especially when it comes to actual resource allocation. Consensus that hunger is unfortunate does not mean commitment to eradicate it, while commitment does not imply agreement on how best to do so. Easy to embrace, hunger is also easy to abandon ("we'll get to it after...") or distort ("developing the economy/stimulating agricultural production will alleviate the problem"). Hunger specialists and their allies concerned with social development function in uncertain and unstable terrain laden with obstacles. And that is before they have even started to act.

The Institutional Eclipse of Hunger
Governments
Governments have long had difficulty organizing to alleviate hunger.

Some have tried interministerial units charged with overseeing and, at times, coordinating the agendas of different ministries. These have typically foundered on the operational autonomy of line ministries and their resistance to being subordinated and coordinated.

Other governments have given responsibility for "nutrition" to specific ministries, especially health, in effect squeezing a multisectoral problem into a single sector while trusting, perhaps, that "hunger" will eventually be ameliorated by the country's overall development policies.

The designated ministries often do not know what to do with malnutrition, leaving it to nutritionists who rarely are central players in the ministry's arena. Not infrequently nutrition agendas collide with broader ministry priorities and are similarly marginalized. Meanwhile, the overall development policies being pursued may have little immediate relevance to reducing hunger and in some instances- such as promoting bimodal agricultural systems with a favored commercial sector and a largely neglected subsistence sector- may actually, if unintentionally, intensify hunger.

Hunger, Protein-Energy Malnutrition, and Food Security
There is some confusion in the use of the terms hunger and malnutrition. How do they relate? This essay equates, the emotive word "hunger" with protein-energy malnutrition (PEM), including but not limited to famine, while excluding micronutrient deficiencies such as in iron, iodine, and Vitamin A, even when these are derived from underlying deficits in proteins and calories. PEM is a more empirically defined concept than hunger, and it helps the latter to be better understood technically. An important corollary to thinking of hunger as PEM is that it gives hunger a health dimension that otherwise might elude recognition.

The currently fashionable term "food security," although more appealing that the 1970s "nutrition planning" as an organizing principal, is not an ideal equivalent for hunger. "Food security" addresses means, not ends. It seeks to
improve food availability and access but is notably inattentive to nutritional outcomesand to their health-related determinants.
International Agencies
International agencies have encountered difficulties of their own in determining how best to organize their hunger agendas.

USAID has eliminated its Office of Nutrition, absorbing it into a new office of population, health and nutrition. The name of this office clearly expresses the lessened priority given nutrition, with funding allocations being even more skewed. Moreover, attention to protein-energy malnutrition has receded in favor of the micronutrient deficiencies, ostensibly because the latter are more health related. The result is a limited, even parochial response to PEM, one that- all too often- is divorced from mainstream economic development.

Similarly, The World Bank has incorporated its Nutrition Unit into a larger entity, the Human Development Department. The Nutrition Section at UNICEF carries on but has largely abandoned protein-energy malnutrition in favor of initiatives on the micronutrients plus breastfeeding. PEM is now pretty much the responsibility of the Health Section, which has numerous other concerns, as well.

The tendency to define protein-energy malnutrition as primarily a health issue and to organize policy responses to it under a health rubric is a mixed blessing. The tendency may seem bizarre when the referent is "hunger." Yet PEM has a strong health component shaped by the body's failure to derive full benefit from nutrients consumed because of infectious disease, parasitic infestation, and other health states. Whereas "hunger" implies consumption deficits only, nutritional status a` la PEM is understood to reflect the interplay of consumption and morbidity.

That said, health interventions alone are clearly an insufficient response to PEM. UNICEF (and WHO) correctly point out that other UN agencies- FAO, WFP, and UNDP especially- come at the problem in appropriate ways that are complementary to their own approaches in the sense both of going beyond health and- in the case of UNICEF- of addressing macro as well as micro (community) conditions. In effect, comprehensiveness in the UN system is achieved by means of organizational and programmatic fragmentation, whereas at USAID and the World Bank, nutrition initiatives are largely confined to the delivery of services, often through health infrastructures, a pattern found in most governments, as well.
Photo: United Nations/John Isaac Universities
Universities, in principle organized to advance our understanding of the world, have had difficulty doing so in the case of hunger. Most have not even tried, but those that have have had rather sobering experiences.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology created and then dismantled its pathbreaking International Nutrition Planning Program in the 1970s. Among the underlying reasons were misgivings about the intellectual rigor of such an interdisciplinary program and rejection of its service, as opposed to scholarly, role. (Early efforts at Meharry Medical College, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the University of California at Berkeley also came to nothing).

More recently, Stanford has abolished its Food Research Institute, largely because the Economics Department regarded it as redundant and inferior.

Brown University has essentially eliminated its World Hunger Program, the demise of this highly visible program being camouflaged by absorption into the Watson Institute for International Affairs. (Leadership change and loss of core funding were also involved).

Tufts University and Cornell University have both struggled with organizing their nutrition programs; in each case, organizing around an issue (hunger/malnutrition) has eroded in preference to organizing around a discipline (nutrition science), while at Tufts international nutrition has also had to share its central role with the emergence of other social science programs that look financially more promising.

In the United Kingdom, both the Food Studies Group at Oxford and its counterpart at the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex have been obliged to recast themselves as consulting groups in order to survive as academic programs.

Indeed, the major exception to this litany of institutional woe is IFPRI, the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, which- tellingly- is not a university.

Why are hunger-oriented institutions and programs in such eclipse? In the case of universities, the answers center on funding, jealousies, and confusion concerning mandates, organizational structure, and organizing principles: the role of interdisciplinary programs in institutions organized primarily around disciplines, and an issue focus as against a disciplinary one (see Box 2). For governments and international agencies, the dilemma is how to organize and manage the action agenda for hunger.

The Nutrition-Hunger Mismatch
Locating a hunger-oriented agenda in a School of Nutrition Science and Policy (such as Tufts) or a Division of Nutritional Sciences (such as Cornell) produces an inevitable tension between social and biomedical scientists.

Social scientists dealing with hunger treat "nutrition" as a dependent variable to be analyzed in relation to a wide range of economic, sociocultural and political conditions which are the primary focus. For them nutrition is an outcome or marker. Biomedical scientists are more likely to study nutrition itself as a set of independent, as well as dependent, variables. Moreover, their arena tends to be the laboratory and their focus to be micro, even cellular, rather than macro/societal. When hunger-oriented economists, political scientists, anthropologists, agriculturalists, and public health professionals are organized together with nutritional biochemists and physiologists on the assumption that they are all much the same or at least are equally devoted to "nutrition", the result is a clash of intellectual cultures that would do C.P. Snow proud and, in effect, a power struggle induced by forced association.Hunger people are unlikely to win such struggles when "nutrition" is the organizing principle.

My personal opinion is that this is a counterproductive way of organizing hunger studies in a university. I also believe that, in the policy realm, "nutrition" is the wrong organizing principle for "hunger" because nutritionists have little to offer in the effort to combat protein-energy malnutrition yet claim centrality in that effort by virtue of the nutrition label.

A predominantly nutritional approach to PEM distorts the response away from the underlying socioeconomic conditions that are central to the problem and its lasting improvement. I am concerned that nutrition advocates have become an interest group claiming resources for nutrition interventions that, in many instances, would be better
spent seeing to removal of the root causes of malnutrition. It may well be that the proprietary claims of nutrition advocates also give some governments an easy escape from having to address hunger in a more serious, yet costly, and conflictual, way. Ironically, the current preoccupation with micronutrient deficiencies in the nutrition community, which comes at the expense of protein-energy malnutrition, actually makes sense from this perspective because it matches nutritionists with nutritional problems for which their expertise is critical.

Organizing Action Against Hunger

This is a difficult task.

In addition to its political problems noted above, hunger poses operational problems by virtue of its being a complex issue, and one that is also structural and derived.

Like "poverty" and "development," "hunger" is a big issue for which no single, onedimensional response will suffice. This leaves hunger policy open-ended and hence subject to controversy even within the development community, where focal concerns vary, paradigms and priorities compete, mandates differ, and actors with compatible, even similar, goals find it necessary to vie with one another for scarce resources.

Moreover, hunger is a state of being produced by other conditions while being embedded in them; and these conditions range from the specific (soils, technologies) to the intermediate (markets, income) to the broad (poverty, political economy).

Hunger is so multifaceted in its causality and context that it is not obvious how best to respond to it. The context is every country in the world, and the causality involves everything from agriculture, to international trade, to the internal and external political dynamics of countries.

It is not obvious whether to organize policy to alleviate hunger as a specific goal or to pursue more discrete goals in agriculture, health, and development at large with the expectation that success in these other areas will alleviate hunger as a happy byproduct.

If the decision is to make hunger a focal concern, a breakthrough that hunger advocates would applaud, there is still the question of how comprehensive vs. specific the policy response should be. Specific hunger policies (improving agricultural yields, reducing post-harvest losses, feeding people in need) have the advantage of directness (do this, get that), in theory at least, and the likely disadvantage of being insufficient to materially change the hunger outcome given other constraints not adequately addressed.

Comprehensive ("multisectoral") approaches have the advantage of being comprehensive and the disadvantage of requiring political and administrative centrality. Not only must a comprehensive strategy to alleviate hunger be reconciled with other concerns (industrial development, for example) that seek similar, if not greater, centrality; like any long-term strategy, it must survive the corroding influence of short-term claims that cannot be ignored (higher wages for the civil service or new military hardware, for example).

Getting a comprehensive plan approved is difficult if the plan is to be authoritative; keeping it intact and on track over time even more so. Moreover, a comprehensive strategy has to be disaggregated into operational components; and these can easily lose linkage, conceptually and in practice, with one another and with hunger itself as other purposes (export promotion, cheap food for urban centers, political patronage) crystallize. When political leaders and ministries end up disagreeing about specific policies and the priorities among them, the fragile consensus informing a comprehensive strategy easily fragments into autonomous components that become ill-connected and even competitive.

This, in effect, is the problem of reconciling big issues of enormous complexity with segmented structures and mandates; and it mirrors over and over again the rational-comprehensive vs. incremental-adaptive approach to decision making assessed in the literature on public administration wherein the intellectual appeal of being comprehensive is thwarted by its operational cumbersomeness.
The Appeal of Policy Disaggregation
Disaggregating big issues into operational components is a necessity that reflects how we now think and function. The British tradition of the classically educated Burkean gentleman

intellectual- capable of making policy judgments on a wide range of subject matter, has yielded - in the United States, in particular- to modes of training and forms of expertise that are highly specialized. With the explosion of knowledge unleashed by modern scientific inquiry, in tandem with the social spread of educational opportunity, has come the compartmentalization of knowledge. The essence of most scholarship is to learn more and more about less and less. Scholarship has become an industry, with knowledge "exploding" because of the numbers engaged in research. However, as knowledge has expanded, expertise has narrowed.

So, too, in the realm of policy and action. As issues- perceived problems, needs, opportunities- have expanded, organizations to deal with them, public and private, have become more numerous, larger and more complex. Similarly, the proliferation of organization has created capabilities previously unknown.

Yet as capabilities have increased, competencies have narrowed. The expansion of organization and of tasks to be performed has necessitated structural differentiation and functional specification. Bureaucracies grow as their responsibilities increase, but this growth is accompanied by segmentation of responsibility. Just as the expansion of knowledge results in its compartmentalization, so the applications of knowledge result in organizational differentiation. Appeals for coordination, even integration, of administrative action speak to the extent to which these values have been compromised in practice. Often they are also asking more than highly differentiated structures with tightly defined mandates are able (and willing) to provide. Interministerial and inter-agency coordination, repeatedly invoked as administrative virtues, usually become an operational curse for this very reason, as the values of autonomy and control override those of subordination, shared responsibility, and mutual dependency.

Seen in this light, a big issue like hunger collides with our intellectual and organizational disposition to small solutions that are easier to allocate, organize, and manage. Technical assistance, with its emphasis on specific types of expertise, reinforces this tendency to disaggregate.
Photo: Catholic Relief Services/Carolyn Watson
Striving for Linkage

Notwithstanding the logic of parceling out specific components of the hunger agenda to largely autonomous units of decision and action, doing so has been at a cost to policy coherence, effectiveness, and reinforcement.

Consequently, there is a counter-tendency toward integration of effort, and this entails incorporating hunger/nutrition agendas into more comprehensive units, as at USAID and the Bank. The result is a trade-off. Organizational reform tries to balance the benefits of issue specificity, visibility, autonomy, and clout with the benefits of incorporation, integration, reinforcement, and possible protection from adversaries. Hunger lends itself to the latter approach because it is a derivative issue that reflects other things. One can isolate hunger, or "nutrition," and give it organizational expression of its own; but in large administrative systems this invites conflict over agendas and control, and it also disposes to isolation and impotence.

To illustrate, USAID's Office of Nutrition, for many years an innovator and catalyst for raising visibility and concern for protein-energy malnutrition, nevertheless confined itself (or was confined) to programs directly targeted to the already malnourished or those nutritionally at risk.

The Office of Nutrition was empowered to develop nutrition interventions but not to address the underlying causes of malnutrition. It dealt with manifestations and sought to treat them in laser beam fashion- food supplements, education, social marketing, etc.; it did not deal with poverty and the multiple objective conditions disposing to malnutrition. Hence, it addressed symptoms, not contexts; and it sought to help the malnourished and those at risk, not to change the conditions outside their control that constrained them. All of that, ostensibly, was someone else's responsibility. By dealing with manifestations and offering only palliation ("nutritional aspirin" if you will), the Office of Nutrition was not really a development agency at all (except insofar as malnutrition itself constrains the development potential of its victims, a prominent argument at the time).

One wonders whether incorporating the Office of Nutrition into the Office of Population, Health and Nutrition was intended to bring "nutrition" more into the development mainstream and to encourage a broader and deeper approach to alleviating malnutrition.

If so, the record to date is not very encouraging . Of the 66 separate projects currently being funded by the Office of Population, Health, and Nutrition, only one, the FANTA project, can be said to address malnutrition as a significant, but by no means exclusive, part of its mandate.

Similarly, food aid's relationship to hunger alleviation- now called "household food security"- continues to be more rhetorical than real. This is true in part because other goals have taken precedence (such as "human capacity development," i.e. education) and in part because documenting nutritional improvement in food aid supported projects has proven to be so difficult (thereby producing other justifications such as providing incentives to attend health clinics and schools).

Clearly, linking hunger to other agendas runs the risk of its being lost as a focal concern and otherwise marginalized in the inevitable array of other objectives.

In sum, it is difficult for agencies to capture and organize something so multifaceted as hunger. Expertise is more narrowly defined, methodologies and technologies are usually more issue and context specific, and institutional jurisdictions are more focused and compartmentalized.

Put another way, hunger overwhelms organized efforts to respond to it. In turn, hunger policy tends to be buffeted by alternative dispositions- disaggregation and integration, autonomy and incorporation- and to suffer the indignities of bouncing around administrative systems when it is not lost in some corner. Managing the hunger agenda is a taxing and often frustrating enterprise as a result. Although no one is to blame for this state of affairs, there is no easy way out of the dilemma of organizing hunger.

The Good News

Hunger is being alleviated in spite of these (and other) impediments (see Box 3). The record is spotty, however; and the hunger community has, on balance, been of only marginal significance to the gains made. Four overlapping conditions appear to be the decisive factors.

First, when a Basic Human Needs strategy of development has been pursued and successfully implemented over a decade or more, be it "growth-mediated" (Korea, Taiwan), "support-led" (Sri Lanka, Kerala), or a blend (China, Chile, Thailand). (These terms are from Dreze and Sen, 1989.)
Responding to Hunger: Five Options
Hunger is the kind of issue, rhetorically appealing yet organizationally and programmatically elusive, that invites policy confusion, inconsistency, tokenism and displacement (things done in its name that have little bearing on it). Consider the following five options as they pertain to government policy and the agendas of international agencies:

Ignore hunger as a focal concern, perhaps trusting that policies pursued for other reasons will impact favorably on it.

Respond to hunger with a few discrete interventions, such as child feeding, that are basically stand-alone initiatives.

Make hunger one of several organizing principles around which a broader policy is defined and organized.

Make the alleviation of hunger the overriding principle and core objective of development policy, subordinating other policies (e.g., export promotion) to it.

Incorporate hunger into a still broader agenda such as Basic Human Needs/Human Development informing an overall development strategy.

Photo: United Nations Burkina Faso: Woman and child

These options would appear to be levels on a continuum signifying seriousness of purpose; yet as levels they do not necessarily imply effectiveness of results. My own sense is that levels 3 and 4 do not exist in fact, even though rhetoric might suggest otherwise. Explicit hunger policy tends to bifurcate between levels 2 (where it is often defined as "nutrition" policy) and 5 (where, ironically, it may not be defined at all). Between the two, most programmatic effort against hunger may be found at level 2, whereas the greatest success in reducing hunger and even eliminating it is the distinctive achievement of level 5. (That, at any rate, is the impression conveyed by the development experience of Thailand, Costa Rica, Kerala, Sri Lanka, and perhaps China and Cuba as well as of Korea, Taiwan, and Chile). Sadly, most development in the modern era is concentrated in level 1, as was the development experience of most Western countries, where hunger carried a badge of social stigma and responsibility for dealing with it was left to private charity.

Second, when a protracted rural based revolution results in a major reallocation of resources toward the poor majority (China, Cuba for a time, Iran, perhaps Zimbabwe).

Third, when a competitive political process emerges, giving populist influence to smallholder agriculture and other rural and lower status groups (Chile, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, the Indian state of Kerala).

Fourth, when political elites forge a social contract with their populations exchanging supports- health, education, employment, subsidized food, etc.- for loyalty (the Thai military, the Baath government in Iraq prior to the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, and Kuwait itself).

What stands out here is the primacy of political conditions, the secondary role of economic variables, and the tertiary role- at best- of the applied technical expertise of hunger specialists. Like nutrition planners of the 1970s, those concerned with hunger today often labor where conditions are least favorable for success.

It remains to be seen whether, in time, hunger specialists are able to break through the many constraints facing them. The odds are likely to be shaped powerfully by the political environment.

Field is Emeritus Professor of World Hunger and International Development, School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Challenge of Famine: Recent Experience; Lessons Learned. 1973. Kumarian Press.
Resources and References Used

Dreze, Jan and Amartya Sen. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989

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The Hunger Dilemma: Addressing World Hunger - World Hunger News

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(June 2002) Efforts to address world hunger are not faring well. Progress since the World Food Conference in 1974 has been disappointing. Although the percentage of malnourished (underweight) children has declined, modestly, in most countries in the intervening 25 years, their numbers continue to rise.

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Second Food harvest one of the biggest food banks in the country that help many low income families. They strive to wipe hunger from communities and from the US. They hold food drives at schools and public places to donante canned food or fresh veggies. Just in 2018 they provided 55,270,008 meals to many hungry and low income families.

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Building a hunger-free community

Second Harvest is committed to doing whatever it takes to build a hunger-free community. That means distributing nutritious food to nearly every neighborhood in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, leveraging every available food resource, and collaborating with organizations and people who share our belief that hunger is unacceptable. Nutritious food is the foundation for a healthy, productive life.
Learn how we are pulling every lever to ensure that we all have the nutritious food we need to fully engage in our lives.

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Impact Building a hunger-free community Second Harvest is committed to doing whatever it takes to build a hunger-free community. That means distributing nutritious food to nearly every neighborhood in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, leveraging every available food resource, and collaborating with organizations and people who share our belief

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The Freshwater Trust is a Trust that helps deliver fresh water to many parts in the country. They give advice and try to save as much fresh water for drinking agriculture, etc. Our fresh water is being wasted and that is deadly as lead is poisoning to children and water being trucked into towns in California.

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May 4, 2016

We're spoiled. Here in America, we take the clean water endlessly flowing out of our tap (for less than we pay for cable) for granted.

It's taking severe catastrophes - occurrences as shocking as lead poisoning in children and water being trucked into towns in California - to turn our heads and hearts toward the health of the element supporting life for us all. There are 155,000 public water systems in the United States. Draw a line back from each of them, and you'll find a watershed at its origin.
In honor of National Drinking Water Week, here are five things we should be doing to protect our water long before it ever makes it to our homes.
Plant more trees: Trees provide shade to lower water temperature and stabilize streambanks to reduce erosion. A buffer of native trees and vegetation can also serve as a filter for agricultural runoff. As fertilizer and other nutrients make its way from a farmer's field to a river, the plants will serve as a barrier, protecting water quality. In 2015, The Freshwater Trust planted more than 12,000 native trees along rivers in the Pacific Northwest.

Build a fence: Keeping livestock and their manure out of waterways reduces nitrogen and phosphorus. It also protects streamside vegetation and bank structure. Excess nutrients cause algae blooms that threaten drinking water supplies. Remember Toledo? Half a million Ohioans were left without drinking water after an algae bloom plagued Lake Erie. Simple practices taken on farms nationwide can make a big difference.

Restore wetlands: Wetlands are giant filters. In central Illinois, wetlands are being restored in order to provide safe drinking water to 90,000 in Bloomington. The town's reservoir has historically had high levels of nitrates, and instead of building an expensive treatment facility, the town chose to build wetlands, a decision that will have more widespread environmental benefits than the engineered option.

Use new tools: The 21st century affords the conservation community many opportunities to use new technologies to do more effective restoration. The Freshwater Trust has developed a toolkit that allows us to understand where restoration along a river would have the greatest benefit for the watershed as a whole. For the first time, those fixing rivers can see exactly what parts of a waterway need the most help.

Collaborate: Water should unite, not divide. After all, we all rely on the waterways running through our communities. In order to ensure enough clean water for future generations, farmers, conservationists, scientists, governments and corporations are going to need to communicate and compromise. It's possible. In 2015, The Freshwater Trust did more than 40 voluntary deals with landowners to keep water in rivers that needed it. The producers still produced. Local economies didn't crumble. More water was available for fish and to improve water quality. What's happening in California is a microcosm of what's to come if we don't all start acknowledging water as the finite resource it is.

The list could go on. Replacing aging infrastructure. Properly disposing of paint and medication. The problems are plenty, but so are the solutions. Implementing any of them will mean remembering the entire watershed on the other end of the tap and that clean, healthy water in this country is far from promised - especially in the absence of action.
#Conservation &nbsp #environmental protection &nbsp #freshwater &nbsp #lead crisis &nbsp #National Drinking Water Week &nbsp #Restoration &nbsp #tap water &nbsp #technology &nbsp #trees &nbsp #unite &nbsp #Watershed &nbsp #wetlands &nbsp

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5 things we should be doing to protect our drinking water | The Freshwater Trust

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May 4, 2016 We're spoiled. Here in America, we take the clean water endlessly flowing out of our tap (for less than we pay for cable) for granted. It's taking severe catastrophes - occurrences as shocking as lead poisoning in children and water being trucked into towns in California - to turn our heads and hearts toward the health of the element supporting life for us all.