Fighting for the hungry

International development agency ActionAid’s HungerFREE campaign is planning a massive protest against the “callous” attitude of governments in addressing the issue of starvation deaths during the 62nd United Nations general assembly in New York.

The agency wants to focus on the fact that even though the assembly had promised to solve the problem of starvation by 2011, about 854 million people all over the world are still going hungry.

Says actor-activist Shabana Azmi, who’ll be in the forefront of this movement, “I have been involved with ActionAid India for two years now and when they decided to lobby at the UN Assembly, they asked me to be a part of it.

It’s time we took starvation seriously — one out of every four Indians is dying of hunger. These are startling facts. Everyone looks at these as cold statistics, but we want to make them emotive issues. We want to ask people how they’d feel if their child or parent went to bed hungry.”

Adds Shabana, “In New York I’ll be joining campaigners from around the world, including several actors from other big film industries to call on world leaders to put food on the table. I will also be making short presentations, distributing literature and doing everything  possible to raise the level of awareness about this problem.”

s_shubha@dnaindia.net