- Target:
- Bangladesh Governement
- Region:
- Bangladesh
- Website:
- www.facebook.com
In September 2000, leaders of the world gathered in New York to assess progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. The target is quite literally, a matter of life and death for the one billion people who struggle on a daily basis to avoid starvation.
With only four years to go, the bitter truth is that the world is going backwards on hunger. The region which is home to largest numbers of hungry people, South Asia, has lost the ground in the wake of the food crisis.
DISTURBING FACTS
*Over 1 billion people are hungry in the world right now.
*Everyday almost 17000 children die from hunger related causes- 1 child in every 5 seconds
*A further 750 million people are now at risk of falling into chronic hunger.
*This means that 1.75 billion people, or 25% of the world's population, now lack basic food security.
*Global food prices have increased by 83 percent in the last 2 years
*70% of the hungry are female. Women in poor countries grow more than 60% of the food but own less than 1% of the land. Yet there is enough food in the world to feed everybody.
So, ACTIONAID ACTIVISTA is coming together globally to spread awareness on CLIMATE JUSTICE and will drive change by pushing governments to introduce and implement laws that bring an immediate end to all deaths by starvation and ensure basic social protection.
It is a Global Youth network of 27 countries, which includes South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Myanmar/Burma, Denmark, United Kingdom, USA, France, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Haiti and Nicaragua.
ACTIVISTA believes that by acting together, poverty and hunger can be ended.
Bangladesh is on the track to meet the MDG1 hunger targets and ranks sixth in 2010 HungerFree scorecard. Bangladesh’s high ranking reflects the progress it has made in reducing hunger amongst its population from 36 percent to 26 percent since 1990. However, the impact of the food and financial crises may mean that Bangladesh could be knocked off track to meet the MDG1 hunger targets.
Today around 65.3 million Bangladeshis still do not have sufficient food to eat. This is around half of all Bangladeshis.
Although Bangladesh has reached near self-sufficiency in food production, rice production in Bangladesh will fall by about 3.9 percent each year due to climatic change.
Land is a critical issue in Bangladesh: about 60 percent of farmers are functionally landless and farm sizes are too small to support a family. One percent of arable land is being lost each year due to climate change and urbanization. Women’s right to land are particularly constrained. Wide scale introduction of sustainable agriculture and land reform is therefore urgently needed.
ACT!VISTA Bangladesh is working under HungerFREE Campaign in ActionAid Bangladesh. Our goal is to engage and sensitize the youth as ACTIVISTAs in fighting to create HungerFREE Bangladesh.
*We call on you to fulfil the obligation to the 65 million people who go hungry every day to ensure that all people have access to the food they need to sustain themselves and their families.
*Enact and enforce laws that guarantee all women the right to own land.
*Ensure that corporations are held accountable for abuses of the rights to food, water, land and seeds
*We demand for the amendment of the constitutional provision for right to food from a constitutional principle to a fundamental right.
*We ask for the high degree of political commitment and broad package of policies for reducing hunger.
*We want you to expand employment generation programmes significantly;
*We ask for the state support for small farmers with key tools and seeds, while expanding irrigation, placing ceiling on land ownership, and support environmentally sustainable production;
*We ask for your commitment to keep the prices of food within reach according to this year’s World Food Day theme- Food Prices from Crises to Stability;
*We want you to increase budget in agriculture.
We understand the bureaucratic and financial barriers you face. We are not naïve, nor are we impractical. We, the youths of the country, hope you seriously consider discussing it, if not accepting it outright.
You can further help this campaign by sponsoring it
The We demand a Right to Food as a Constitutional Right! petition to Bangladesh Governement was written by ACT!VISTA Bangladesh and is in the category Human Rights at GoPetition.