A Person Who Has Food Has Many Problems

Background Information

‘A person who has food has many problems.

A person who has no food has only one problem’

- Chinese Proverb

What is hunger?

Have you ever said, “I’m starving?” All of us have felt hungry at times. But there are many degrees of hunger.

We have enough food to feed everyone on the planet. Yet, in every corner of the world, rich and poor, there are people who are unable to lead healthy, active lives because they do not have adequate food. There are many complex political, economic and social factors that contribute to global hunger and, as a result, there are no easy solutions to the hunger problem. Poverty is one of the root causes of hunger. When people lack the opportunity to earn enough money, they cannot meet their basic needs.

Malnutrition is an extreme form of hunger, resulting from inadequate consumption of nutrients to meet the basic physical requirements for an active and healthy life. While most people can go without food for a few days, persistent hunger causes severe problems - impaired vision, fatigue, delayed growth, and increased vulnerability to diseases. Severely malnourished people have difficulty functioning, even at a basic level. In extreme cases, hunger can cause death.

Concern Worldwide is working for a world where no-one lives in poverty, fear or oppression; where all have access to a decent standard of living and the opportunities and choices essential to a long and healthy life; a world where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

Assembly Suggestion

The FoodAid PowerPoint presentation is designed to encourage pupils to think about food. You can use the presentation in the way we suggest here, or you can adapt it to match your needs and times constraints.

Slide 1 and 2 – Title page and an introduction to FoodAid and Concern Worldwide

Slide 3 to 8 – These slides encourage pupils to think about food – what their favourite foods are; where food comes from; and how the poorest people in the developing world access food.

Slide 3 – Ask pupils what their favourite foods are. Do they see some of them on the screen? Why do they like these foods? Do they think these are healthy foods? Do they think it’s important to eat a variety of foods? What are some things they should eat to have a healthy diet?

Slide 4 - These are some of the foods that make up a healthy diet. Food is an essential part of everyone’s lives. It gives us the energy and nutrients to grow and develop, be healthy and active, to move, work, play, think and learn. The body needs a variety of the following 5 nutrients - protein, carbohydrate, fat, vitamins and minerals – plus fibre and water from the food we eat to stay healthy and productive.

The consequences of not having a balanced diet are numerous: if you do not eat enough protein, you will not be able to grow properly; if you do not eat enough energy containing foods (e.g. carbohydrates and fat), you will feel very tired; and if you eat too much energy containing foods you might become overweight.

Slide 5 - Where does food come from? Ask pupils where they get their food from. They may say the supermarket or local shops. What do they need to get food – money for example? Do any of them grow their own food? What do you need to grow food? – Land, seeds, sun and rain.

Slide 6 - Once we have seeds and land, we need the weather to give us sun and rain. But we don’t always get the right amount of sun or rain.

Slide 7 – This is Ilo and Gonche. They live in the countryside in Kenya, Africa. After 3 years of drought the land in their area is very dry. Nothing much grows here. Ilo and Gonche have a herd of goats that they sell at market to get money to buy food and other things they might need like medicine or clothes for their families.

Since the drought, they find it very hard to find food for their goats to eat or to find clean water to drink. They spend most of their days out in the countryside looking for vegetation for their goats. As they walk home, the wind is blowing very hard, whipping up the dry soil and sand into a ‘dust-storm’.

Concern is helping people like Ilo and Gonche to get the water they need by digging wells deep into the ground. They can use this water to drink, cook and wash and to water vegetable plots so that they can grow more food.

Slide 8 - This is one of the farmers living on the Char Islands in the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. He and his family have a small farm with a few animals. They use the land to grow all the food they need to eat. But when it started to rain very heavily the river started to flood into his fields. All the crops he was growing were ruined.

He and his family lost all their food in the flood and many of their belongings. Concern Worldwide is helping the farmers in this area protect their land from floods and is helping them get the seeds they need to plant a new crop. In the meantime, they will get help to make sure they have enough food to last them until they can harvest the new crop.

Slide 9 to 11 - These slides explain how fundraising for FoodAid will help Concern Worldwide continue in their work with these communities.

Slide 9 – This is Emmanuelle. He is seven years old. Every morning he helps his father on their farm before going to school. You can see him here feeding the cows straw. Emmanuelle’s family live in Ethiopia, they have a small farm, but they can grow enough food to feed themselves and even has enough left over to sell at market.

But it wasn’t always this way. Four years ago Emmanuelle’s small farm was little more than dusty land. Their harvest was often poor and they had to sell any animals they had to buy food.

Concern helped Emmanuelle’s family by building a channel carrying water from the nearby river. With this water they were able to grow lots more crops and even if the rain didn’t come in time, they were able to use the river water to water their crops. They now grow wheat, tomatoes, onion, chili and mangoes. They even have enough left over to sell at market and with the money they have bought cows.

Slide 10 – What your money can buy. This slides gives some examples of what the money raised can buy.

Slide 11 – This is a slide showing the interactive farm poster included in your FoodAid pack. Use this to help show your fundraising total by adding in animals, crops and tools as your total grows. You can explain how it works to the children during this presentation or reveal your total to show how well everyone has done.

Slide 12 – This is the final slide. It is a photo of the pupils of a Primary School in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Many of them have benefited from the work Concern Worldwide is doing helping small traders in the inner city markets selling bread and other goods. Many mothers sell these products to pay their children’s school fees.

Further resources and action

The FoodAid website has a selection of Lesson Plans and Factsheets that may help you prepare for this assembly or continue the learning in the classroom.

You will also find other stories from around the world of how Concern Worldwide’s work is bringing lasting benefits to the poorest communities across the world.

The FoodAid website offers lots of suggestions for fundraising activities. Check out the FoodAid showcase page where schools share their fundraising successes from last year if you are looking for some inspiration.

For further information on Concern Worldwide visit our home website at .

FoodAid supports Concern Worldwide’s food programmes in 28 of the world’s poorest countries.

Concern Worldwide is an international organisation dedicated to reducing suffering and working towards the elimination of extreme poverty. Registered charity no. 1092236