A father and son sit on the side of a road that once bore witness to a multitude of vehicles each second of each day, now it sits as destitute as they are. A woman looks at her hungry child, unsure of whether it would be easier if it was never born, at least she could have survived alone. A man hangs from a tree in the middle of his barren fields; starvation was too cruel a fate for him to survive.
Hunger does not discriminate in a world where discrimination is too often one’s reality. One may imagine that if the bible describes gluttony to be a deadly sin, then remaining hungry must be a virtue, but the abstract concept of an eternal reward does not outweigh the tangible pain of forced hunger. Those who live with a constant void in their guts cannot imagine a world where hunger does not constantly wrap its formless tentacles around their helpless bodies, but perhaps a vision is necessary for those who can help these people.
A world without hunger is a world that may never be, but what harm can it do to dream. A dream that begins in a misty spiral descent from the heavens, as we pierce the silvery clouds, we see them, golden fields that ripple in the wind, almost a mirage. They seem to carry on forever and ever, sailing over those fields that are ever so close, yet so far only imagined by those who hunger and ignored by those with enough. The crops part like golden gates as we pass through them, we now sit, waiting as a nameless faceless entity hands us a bowl with all the food we need to keep us fed. The aroma of a hundred thousand tastes hits the air, but before it can be tasted, there is a rumbling. There is a rumbling that shakes the very foundations of the world that exists only in the dreams of a famished dreamer and as that terrible shaking reaches a crescendo, eyes shoot open and realize that the growling cosmos originated and ended in the gut.
Hundreds and thousands and millions awaken every day, with that very same growl in their guts and no way to satisfy it. They dream that same dream of a bowl filled with enough, doomed for it to never come their way, but it does not have to be that way for all generations to come. This is because others have dreamed too. The few that dream for the good of the many are hard to come by, but they leave a visible impact in the world. The dreamers that led to Sustainable development Goal number 2, No Hunger, did not have entirely different dreams from the famished dreamer, so let us have a look at their dreams.
A world without hunger is a world that may never be, but what harm can it do to dream. A dream that begins in a misty spiral descent from the heavens, as we pierce the silvery clouds, we see them, golden fields that ripple in the wind, bigger than ever before. We do not fly above them, but instead walk through them, they are ours to grab and to harvest and to eat. We walk through an archway of golden crops and behold something great. We see people, eating to their hearts desire, we see all the people of the world simultaneously fulfilled and we are handed a bowl to join into this charming vignette. The rumbling never comes, instead there is only a number, 2030
2030 is the year that the dream of no hunger should come to pass, when all dreamers are vindicated and their dreams realized. 2030 is the year when hunger becomes a thing of the past and a rumble in a gut becomes a forgotten nightmare. 2030 is the year that the golden fields stretch out over the horizon, but only if we stretch hands out to our fellow humans. The global hunger pandemic can only be solved by the concerted effort from both the dreamers and the doers of this world.
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