A child walks down a shanty area in Hyderabad, India. Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because of insufficient nutrition, with South Asia accounting for 83 million hungry children under 5, according to a new report published by UNICEF before a three-day international summit on the problem of world hunger. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.)
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Taking to the Global Media Stage to End World Hunger
By Nicia Sanelli
In hopes of encouraging change, media can be utilized as a global stage or a way for the world to be exposed to important issues of the day. For some, the international media attention given to UN Summits provides such opportunity. On Monday, November 16th, 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched a three-day summit in Rome geared towards ending world hunger. Moon began this summit with the statistic: “six million children die of hunger each year — 17,000 everyday.” Through this meeting Moon hoped to educate others about the urgent need to end world hunger so they would take political action. The UN Secretary General stated that by 2050 “the world will need to feed 2 billion more mouths — 9.1 billion in all.”
It could be inferred that the UN hopes, with this summit, to create a CNN effect. A CNN effect is simply another word for a political catalyst, accelerating or forcing a government to action. Now that the facts have been placed in front of 60+ world leaders, along with world media, it will be hard for them to ignore the issue. It will be interesting to see whether the UN efforts will be proved successful, or if further action will need to take place.