UN Deletes Article Touting ‘Benefits’ of World Hunger: ‘Hungry People Are the Most Productive People’
NICHOLAS ROBERTS/AFP via Getty Images
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.
Screenshots of the post, which web archives appear to show was first published in 2009, began to circulate on Twitter Wednesday.
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.
In it, former University of Hawaii professor George Kent wrote,
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.
Kent went on to ask, “How many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?” he further noted, “For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.”
Kent concluded,
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.
The article appears as though it might be an attempt at satire, as Kent’s background displays a career dedicated to ending global food disparities.
In 2005, he published a book titled “Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food.”
The UN has not commented on the matter.
