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NewsOctober 15, 1995

The 12th annual World Food Day teleconference will be telecast from 11 to noon Monday at Southeast Missouri State University. The teleconference, "Fighting Hunger: Looking Back, Looking Ahead" will be downlinked into the University Center Ballroom, said Georganne Syler, an assistant professor in the university's human environmental studies department...

The 12th annual World Food Day teleconference will be telecast from 11 to noon Monday at Southeast Missouri State University.

The teleconference, "Fighting Hunger: Looking Back, Looking Ahead" will be downlinked into the University Center Ballroom, said Georganne Syler, an assistant professor in the university's human environmental studies department.

A number of classes will attend the teleconference, and the public is welcome, Syler said. Discussion will follow.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates nearly 800 million people worldwide suffer chronic "undernutrition," Syler said.

"Hunger worldwide is due primarily to poverty and inaccessibility to food," she said. In some cases, families may lack transportation to food sites, or the sites themselves may not be available in certain regions or transport routes may have been disrupted by civil unrest, illness or war.

"There's a lot of food in the world," she said. "Agriculturally, we are certainly able to produce plenty of food. The problem is getting the food to the right places. It's not even overpopulation."

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In the United States, it's not uncommon for low-income families to have access only to convenience stores that don't offer nutritious food like fresh vegetables and fruits, but instead offer a variety of high-calorie, low-nutrition processed foods, she said.

"Hunger virtually doesn't exist in the U.S., except among people who are critically ill or chronically ill" with long-term, debilitating diseases like AIDS or cancer, Syler said. "Someone who just pilfers through garbage could eat tons. That doesn't mean they're well-nourished, though. We're looking at this from more of a global perspective."

On a global scale and in the United States, women and children are impacted most severely by disease and development problems caused by undernutrition and hunger, Syler said.

The organizations that sponsor World Food Day have made empowering populations suffering from hunger or undernutrition their goal, she said. By helping people establish "sustainable economies and a sustainable society," many of the problems causing hunger and undernutrition can be eliminated.

"Initially, though, our goal is simply feeding people," she said.

At Monday's telecast, the annual Crop Walk for hunger awareness will be announced, she said. The walk will be held Nov. 5 at Cape County North Park, starting at 1:30. People are also being encouraged to volunteer to work at FISH, an ecumenical food pantry in Cape Girardeau.

This year's program will focus on widespread concern at the increasing difficulty of maintaining food production to keep up with population growth, particularly in Asia and Africa, where available cropland and water resources are deteriorating.

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