Starvation and preventable disease cause much more death than all war, terrorism and political repression combined. Because the middle-classes of the wealthy countries do not experience starvation and preventable disease, they tend to attack only the violence they see and overlook this "institutional violence." Violence caused by inaction is overlooked.

We Maoists believe a dead persyn is dead whether shot by a bullet or starved to death. The communist movement has done the most to alleviate violence this century. All the charges of all the biggest lying propagandists do not add up to the starvation and preventable disease that occurs under capitalism.

Estimates:

1. 40,000 Third World children starve to death or die from simple preventable diseases each day.

New York Times, September 17, 1992, p. a24.

2. 38,000 children starve to death each day.

Unfortunately, this fact is available mostly from vegetarian lifestyle websites. E.g.,

http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/vegeta.html

3. Over 800 million people are chronically undernourished as of 1994-6.

http://www.fao.org/NEWS/FACTFILE/IMG/FF9808-e.pdf

4. 60,000,000 die of starvation each year.

--Pulitzer Prize author John Robbins, heir to Baskin Robbins fortune
(When we say we use bourgeois sources at MIM, we do not kid!)
http://www.alchemilla.com/realities.html

Here is another bourgeois source of hunger info: Bread for the World

For Clinton type investment rhetoric, see Hunger Project says only 24,000 die each day from starvation

For an interesting graphic, see Hunger Site also says only 24,000 die each day from starvation

For people who like actual books, see also,
Hunger 1995: Causes of Hunger (Silver Spring, MD: Bread for the World Institute)

We also cooperate in selling a book called World Hunger: Twelve Myths (Do a search for "Twelve Myths".)

For the political views of bourgeois internationalists who also agree that food is a humyn right but who do not hold governments responsible and who oppose revolution, see World Hunger organization

Other ineffective bourgeois organizations: Oxfam at Oxfam on the scope of the problem

Different organizations use different methods of calculating deaths from starvation, so there is some variation in the numbers, but all see starvation in the millions each year and once various preventable diseases are counted, we get into eight digit numbers each year dying from poverty. Technical problems arise as to whether the cause is a disease or lack of calories. People with adequate diets do not suffer many of the diseases that kill the poor. On the other hand, once sick, the hungry poor can still often be saved with relatively cheap healthcare simply not available.

In reality, it is impossible for health care professionals to sort out the various causes of preventable death into neat compartments in a consistent way for the whole world. Although readers should understand the general scale of socially preventable deaths that occur each year, there is no substitute for reading generally about the causes of starvation, death from preventable disease and death from war.