VOA常速英语:专家表示：赋予妇女权力将有助于消除全球饥饿问题

Hunger kills more people around the world than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.The majority of those living in hunger are suffering from chronic food deficiency which is the result of persistent poverty, the kind that does not appear in daily news reports.

“Right now, what’s in the news are the famines in Yemen, and in South Sudan, and in other countries of the world.Somalia... There has been drought in Ethiopia, there are these emergencies.”

John Coonrod is executive vice-president of the Hunger Project,a 40-year-old nongovernmental group that helps communities in 12 countries develop strategies to end hunger.

“The largest number of hungry people are in India. The largest percentage of place where the hunger is the most wide-spread is in Africa.As about 220 million hungry people in Africa, about 280 million hungry people in South Asia.”

While floods and droughts can cause sporadic food crises,persistent shortages are the result of long-term poor managements, says Coonrod.That world produces enough food for 10 billion people more than enough for the global population of 7.5 billion.But as a result of a range of deeply-entrenched social issues in many parts of the world, close to 800 million people are chronically hungry.

“Most of hungry people are food farmers, and most of the food farmers in the world are women.”But while women do most of the agricultural work, in patriarchal societies, they are not allowed to make decisions.

“When you empower women, they make the decisions that most affect the lives of the family.They are the ones feeding the children, so when they get to make decisions, they prioritize food, they prioritize health care, they prioritize education.So because they are directly the ones in the societies doing the work, they know what needs to be done.”

The Hunger Project works on educating communities on how to become self-reliant,and that takes the participation of all their members.Coonrod says world food projects are by and large successful.World hunger has been nearly cut in half since 1990 and he says the goal of ending it by 2030 is achievable.

Zlatica Hoke, VOA News, Washington.