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An article published by the United Nations hailing the benefits of hunger has gone viral on social media today, with netizens expressing shock over the claims made in the article titled “The Benefits of World Hunger”. Written by retired Hawaiian professor George Kent, the article explains how hunger is needed to get workers for low-level manual jobs. It was published on UN Chronicle, the flagship magazine of the UN.
The article argues that people work to fight hunger, and if there is no hunger, there will be nobody to do the manual jobs.
He termed the notion that people should be fed well to make them more productive ‘nosense’, saying that “No one works harder than hungry people.”
The article caused great outrage on social media across the world, with common netizens and well-known people slamming it for glorifying hunger for the benefits of the rich.
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 naive 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.
For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of
us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.
An article appearing on the United Nations Chronicle website as recently as Wednesday that touted the “benefits of world hunger” has seemingly been taken down.
A link to the article, which now takes visitors to an error page.
It was archived before it was apparently scrubbed from the website by the agency on Thursday
The UN has not commented on the matter.