The UN notes the world is “facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the UN … more than 20 million people across four countries face starvation and famine. Without collective and coordinated global efforts, people will simply starve to death. Many more will suffer and die from disease.”
One of the reasons scholars like Gary Francione have said “there is nothing more elitist than the standard Western diet” is (as Obama and many officials have pointed out) the plants used in the US alone to feed the animals US citizens eat (a vice that is not only unnecessary but is causing a major health crisis in the US) could feed the world several times over.
If US citizens wanted to, they could use their land, resources, and historically unprecedented global military apparatus to stop the global hunger crisis at very little cost to themselves. For this to occur, oligarchic dictation elements of the US government system (which, as “study after study” reveals, ensures the majority of the citizenry has no effect on government policy and prevents US citizens from having, for example, even the single-payer healthcare system they have polled as wanting for decades) would have to be replaced, but this is another choice for US citizens.
Instead, the US is directly contributing to the hunger crisis by expending countless tons of food on producing harmful animal products for US consumption and, for example, by assisting the brutal Saudi dictator Salman Abdulaziz in enforcing a food blockade on Yemen, which imports almost all its food and where the UN notes “millions of children” are on the brink of starvation.
While US citizens are lead to believe (as reflected in polls – see paragraph 1) that US aid to other countries is a large portion of GDP, in fact it is virtually nothing, and the biggest recipient of US aid by far is Israel, a regional, nuclear superpower, a major human rights violator (making the aid illegal), and one of the richest countries in the world.
Robert J. Barsocchini is an independent researcher and reporter whose interest in propaganda and global force dynamics arose from working as a cross-cultural intermediary for large corporations in the film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists.