ECOSOC-Brazil

Topic: Possible Eradication of World Hunger

The United Nation’s Economic and Social Council is responsible for coordinating and dealing with economic and social problems such as eradicating world hunger. According to “AlJazeera” a Middle Eastern news network, the world produces enough food to feed everyone. Even though, one, in each six people is chronically hungry every day. Adding too, more than 24,000 people die of hunger and malnutrition every day. Also, these rates will continue to rise because of greed, mismanagement and or lack of political role in under-developed countries.
In Brazil, the Zero Hunger project (“Fome Zero”), a national effort to eliminate hunger has given each Brazilian the opportunity of three meals a day. Also, with this project, more then one quarter of Brazil’s population currently live below the poverty line. Until today, more than 70 billion reais have been directed to the project. The president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, launched the project to which main goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger through both immediate and long-term measures and effects. One of the project’s components, the Family Grant (“Bolsa Familia”) program has given each family a monthly income of on average 40 dollars (72 reais) a month. In the northeastern part of the country, 770,000 families have benefited from free milk every day. In addition, there are also community kitchens, communal restaurants and food banks that provide a fair amount of food for about 50 cents (one real). More over, the Brazilian government always provides basic food baskets in natural disasters and for landless rural workers and indigenous in isolated communities.
Brazil condemns the current measures that are taken by undeveloped countries in which money for the poor is used to pay debts for developed countries. In order to stop this from happening, the UN should take the initiative to do the same Zero Hunger project worldwide. As it is the major goal of the UN to eradicate half of the hunger worldwide by 2015, implementing the Zero Hunger project will make it possible to gradually eliminate malnutrition, hunger and poverty rates to some degree.

Fellow delegate,
The delegation of Senegal would first like to congratulate the efforts that the Brazilian Republic is undergoing in order to try to eliminate hunger and poverty in Brazil; as a result much people have left the poverty line since the program was introduced. However, the delegation of Senegal does not agree with the proposition of the Brazilian delegation of adapting the Brazilian model of hunger combat and apply it to the whole world for many reasons. The first one is that different countries have different characteristics and while Brazil has an average GDP per capita of $8,295, countries such as Sierra Leone have an average GDP per capita of $331 and hold considerable amounts of external debt. Thus, the introduction of a global “Fome Zero” program would result in the increasing of their external debt by unimaginable amounts of money. In Brazil, the Fome Zero program (for the 2003 year) had a budget of R$ 1.8 billion which has been increased yearly since the program was first introduced. Therefore, the developed nations would need to fund the biggest part of this “Fome Zero” program. Secondly, one of the bigger problems with the “Fome Zero” program in Brazil is that it does not provide the people with the instruction on how to eat properly nor provides professional training in order to help the receivers of aid leave the program. In this sense, programs such as “The Hunger Project” (which, with limited funding has been proven very effective through education, stimulation of food diversity, introduction of nutritional supplements and microfinance) in Senegal and in other parts of Africa are much more effective than the “Fome Zero” project because they educate (rather than just distribute). Microfinance is also an important aspect because it guarantees that nations will receive money back once a whole community has been improved. Thirdly, there has been much discussion in relation to the “Bolsa Família” and “Fome Zero” programs because their criteria for determination are not very clear and oftentimes people that have high incomes, or even cats receive these benefits. Finally, many scholars argue that these social programs in Brazil are used as parts of electoral campaigns because they give money to the uneducated. Thus, programs that follow the structure of “The Hunger Project” are much more beneficial: since they do not have a bond to the local governments, the possible usage of such programs for corruption is almost zero. Conclusively, the delegation of Senegal does not agree with the delegation of Brazil that programs such as “Fome Zero” should be used as a model for the whole World, in an attempt to eradicate hunger.

"that they educate (rather than just give)"--Can the delegate of Senegal please explain how Senegal will use education in order to eradicate world hunger?

Brazil-ECOSOC_Amer wrote:

"that they educate (rather than just give)"--Can the delegate of Senegal please explain how Senegal will use education in order to eradicate world hunger?

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Dear delegate of Senegal,
I'm looking forward to hearing more about your proposed solutions on the topic at hand.

See you soon,
The Delegation of Brazil