by Veronika Kyrylenko
The New American
An article entitled “The Benefits of World Hunger” published by the United Nations went viral on social media on Wednesday, with many users expressing shock and disbelief over the inhumane claims made in it. Facing the uproar, the organization took it down on Thursday.
The now-deleted piece, written back in 2008 by a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, George Kent, explains how hunger serves as a “foundation of wealth” and how it is beneficial for the world economy.
It reads like some kind of cruel satire:
We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour…
Steve Milloy, a lawyer and Fox News commentator, tweeted, “While the UN pushes the world to invest trillions in a hopelessly dishonest bid to change the weather, 7500 children die every day from hunger, per UNICEF. The notion that world hunger is some capitalist plot is idiotic.”
