Tell Congress: End Hunger Now

Today, we have the power to cut the number of people who go to bed hungry—over a billion— in half.

At this moment, we’re already spending money internationally to help curb world hunger—a noble endeavor, right? But it’s not handled very well, making the money we spend sort of redundant.

The fact is, there is food to go around—it’s just not distributed fairly. The aid we give as a county is distributed through several dozen organizations. What that does is make the distribution even more scarce and disorganized, a practice that Mercy Corps says results in “little coordination and even less accountability for delivering timely and effective aid to the world’s most vulnerable. We can do better.”

Indeed, we can!

While over a billion people go to bed hungry each night, the Roadmap to End Global Hunger and Promote Food Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2817) can give relief to at least half of these people.

Here’s how the bill works. Instead of having all of this relief money being spread over the globe willy-nilly, it will create a White House Office on Global Hunger and Food Security that will be responsible for reporting directly to the president. It will mandate that the U.S. support environmentally sustainable farming methods, and it will also enforce a strategy that’s coordinated and effective in cutting global hunger in half by 2015—which, as you may already know, is one of the cornerstones of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

Many organizations—including Mercy Corps—endorse this plan as solid steps toward eradicating hunger. While it doesn’t save every person, it has the potential of saving half a billion people—just with a little restructuring and simple management.

For most of us, it’s pretty hard for us to believe that you can actually die from having no food. Yes, we see homeless people asking for change, and yes, sometimes it’s hard to put food on the table in this economy; many of us have had to live off ramen noodles, macaroni and hotdogs during at least one part of our lives. But most of us have not been faced with dying from hunger.

If you support this important legislation, please write to your representative today and ask him or her to support H.R. 2817. Together we can take the steps today to ensure a peaceful world where no one goes hungry tomorrow.