* Source: Diario El Pais says
The Anglo-Indian writer Raj Patel in his curious and interesting trial Stuffed and Starved (Los Libros del Lince, editors): Today there are more food than ever, but 800 million people are starving. And, in return this figure of vertigo, other data also absolutely stunning and unprecedented in the history of humanity: one billion people, ie one in six, are overweight. Both extremes, excess and deficiency are dramatic. The morbidly obese are often destroy health and life, in terms of the starving, they die really, literally, there are 25,000 deaths a day from malnutrition, including a child every five seconds. Constant planetary catastrophe, we manage to ignore. Imagine a hurricane, a flood, an earthquake killed 750,000 people in a month. It would be an impressive affair, a tragedy that would be on the front page of newspapers and that would cause urgent relief campaign to send food and money. But people killed by hunger itself just take up space in our care. They die quietly, discreetly, hundreds of thousands each month, locked in their modest houses or huts, with no strength to protest, abandoned. Some victims are very comfortable. There is something obviously deranged and sick in a world that, first, bursting with unnecessary fat and, second, allowing the slow, terrifying torment of starvation. The worst thing is that the evil of the matter goes far beyond mere paradox between fat and thin. On Jan. 31 came a national news talking decommissioning in India of an illegal kidney trade. About 500 people, overwhelmingly poor people, had been operated by force or by deception and had a kidney removed. In some cases interventions were consenting donors and their organs sold for about 800 euros, but then the smugglers were paid by them between 17,000 and 34,000 euros. The operations were carried out in a secret operating room at 30 miles from New Delhi, and the buyers were wealthy Indians but also foreign clients, Saudi Arabia and the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Greece. Well, this business atrocious human offal is a growing market: the global demand for kidneys steadily rises in rich countries, because of the unprecedented rise in obesity is causing many renal disorders. And so full circle this tale of horror that seems to come from a childhood nightmare, with ogres sacamantecas sipping the bowels of the underdog.
Unfortunately, the closure of the underground theater is not the end of the illegal sale of organs. Raj Patel, in his book that in the poorest countries, many starving farmers who sell their kidneys, and even his body to bits, four dogs, and specifically mentioned Shingnapur village in Amravati district in India , where the farmers have set up a sales center kidneys: "That's all we have left to sell." According to Patel, the world is full of very poor farmers to desperation and death from malnutrition, even suicide or selling their bodies. Those who should be cultivating the land to produce more food with which to combat world hunger are the first to die because of hunger. Something is horribly wrong in the basic organization of this planet.
And worst, most excruciating and embarrassing, is that hunger could be solved. That is, it is not an objective of impasse, we are not talking about creating a colony on Mars, for example, but something that, although complex is within our reach. But last June in Rome Food Summit of FAO, a pompous and brilliant meeting attended by 50 heads of state and 100 ministers, and talked for three days and cackled and wore, and I suppose also spent a budget of havoc caused in the event. A pantomime that did not help, because the summit was a failure and was closed without reaching any agreement reached cash. And in the background, behind so much incompetence and negligence, that the inaudible whimper seventh of the world population is starving to mansedumb
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