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a Common Place (magazine) Resources Food: A Plate Half Full (video) Food for all: A Buffet of Ideas About Hunger (children's activity packet) Harvest in the Balance: Food, Justice and Biotechnology (book) Debt Causes Hunger (booklet) Conflict Causes Hunger (booklet) Links Bread for the World, www.bread.org The United Nations World Food Program, www.wfp.org |
Hunger and its causesPalestine A well-educated population. Fertile farmland. Palestine/Israel is not a place people normally expect to find hunger. Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, however, don't have "normal" lives, but live instead under a military occupation that is devastating the Palestinians' economy and society.
For the past two years, Israel, as the occupying power in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has imposed a comprehensive closure, or siege, on the occupied Palestinian territories. This closure severely restricts movement from town to town, village to village. Access to schools, hospitals and job sites has become difficult and sometimes impossible. As a result of the closure, unemployment levels are higher than 60 percent throughout the occupied territories, while nearly half of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live under the poverty line of $2 U.S. per day. Unemployment and lack of purchasing power have crippled household food supplies. A study funded by the United States Agency for International Development has uncovered disturbingly high levels of malnutrition among children under age 5. Thirteen percent of children in the study were chronically malnourished, while 9 percent suffered from acute (severe) malnutrition. Extended families and neighbors have traditionally helped poorer families meet their basic food needs. In the current situation, however, these traditional sharing mechanisms are breaking down, as everyone's resources are stretched to the breaking point. Many families rely on the United Nations or international organizations such as MCC for food assistance. MCC has joined other Christian organizations in purchasing local food for distribution to the neediest families in the occupied territories. "We appreciate the food assistance," one recipient in the West Bank town of Beit Jala told an MCC worker. "But much more than food, what we really need is our freedom." With freedom to move and to work, Palestinians would be able to meet their own food needs. |
