In 1993, Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist on a photo shoot in Sudan, came across a starving child resting on its way to a UN food distribution centre. A hungry vulture sat behind the struggling kid, waiting for its moment of opportunity. This gut-wrenching image won Carter a Pulitzer Prize. But his critics tore him apart, suggesting that he should have helped the child instead of capturing poverty. Carter justified his action and insisted that he did try to help the child. The next year, in July 1994, Cater ended his life. His suicide note is heartbreaking:
I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…!
Twenty-five years after Carter’s photograph outraged a global audience, poverty and hunger continue to pose a grave threat to humanity. Despite ‘global efforts,’ ‘declarations,’ and ‘resolutions,’ the progress has been, to put it politely, abysmal. For instance, eradicating poverty and hunger are the first two UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the Heads of State in 2000. Yet, fifteen years later, in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the world’s leaders have 17 Goals. The first two remain the same:
- “No Poverty”
- “Zero Hunger”
It’s disappointing that even after fifteen years of ‘global efforts’ poverty and hunger have not been ameliorated. Did these organisations and lofty-sounding ‘goals’ accomplish much in the past fifteen years?
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