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Friday, July 23, 2010

Bangladesh

Rising unemployment and food prices and a sluggish economy are taking their toll on Bangladesh, where a growing number of people are struggling to survive. About 40 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million people live on less than $1 a day and are food insecure, according to government figures. Such food insecurity severely affects the population’s health, with nearly seven million children under five underweight and three million who are acutely malnourished, according to WFP. Micronutrient malnutrition - the silent hunger - is also at alarming levels in Bangladesh, affecting nearly 30 million women and 12 million children under five years old.

“If I do not get work tomorrow or become ill, all my family members will go hungry,” said Nur Islam, a 45-year-old Dhaka resident who hauls a rickshaw around town for US$3 a day to feed his wife and three children.

Nearly 60 percent of food insecure households said they were going hungry due to insufficient income.
"...Sometimes there is availability of food, but the poor people do not have the purchasing power,” said Quazi Shahabuddin, researcher and former director-general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.

If there is not the prospect of profit then people who can not pay for food die of hunger. All this in order that a relatively few people can accumulate wealth often far beyond what any human being could require in a thousand lifetimes.

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