UN takes down 2008 article that highlights “benefits” of world hunger

08/03/2022 / By Belle Carter

An article published 14 years ago by the United Nations Chronicle resurfaced on social media and went viral because of its controversial take on world hunger.

Written by a former University of Hawaii (UH) political science professor, the article titled “The Benefits of World Hunger” highlighted the “good” in world hunger. It was promptly taken down from the website and declared as satirical.

“This article appeared in the UN Chronicle 14 years ago as an attempt at satire and was never meant to be taken literally. We have been made aware of its failures, even as satire, and have removed it from our site,” the UN official Twitter account posted.

The revived article written by now-retired UH professor George Kent was written for the UN’s digital magazine back in 2008 and went largely unnoticed for more than a decade.

“I never intended it as satire,” Kent who is now the deputy editor for “World Nutrition” magazine told Newsbusters.

Kent said he did not hope that it would be read as praise for hunger. “My main point was and still is that some people benefit from the existence of hunger in the world. That helps to explain why hunger is so persistent in many places.”

Michigan Capitol Confidential also reached out to the former professor via email. He responded by saying that he thinks it is unfortunate that the paper was taken down. (Related: United Nations brags about supposed “benefits” of WORLD HUNGER in now-deleted op-ed.)

Wealthy people taking advantage of world hunger to find cheap labor

Kent said the article was not meant to praise hunger but to raise a point.

“We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as compared with the plague or AIDS. But that naive view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger,” he wrote at the time.

According to Kent, hunger has a great positive value to many people and it is fundamental for the world economy to work. He highlighted that hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labor.

Kent went on to say the foundation of wealth of those who depend on the availability of cheap labor is in fact starvation.

“No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have a greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work,” the 2008 article read.

In the story, he defined slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs and said that there were an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide. That was in 2008.

In 2022, non-governmental organization Free the Slaves said 40 million people, including children, are forced to work against their will, generating $150 billion in profits annually for traffickers.

About 50 percent or 21 million workers are stuck in forced labor slavery in industries that depend on manual labor, such as farming, ranching, logging, mining, fishing and brick making. The same is true for dishwashers, janitors, gardeners and maids in service industries.

He added that ending hunger globally would be a disaster for the ones that are at the high end of the social ladder.

“If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset,” Kent wrote to drive home his point in the 2008 article.

Dr. Joseph Mercola, physician and best-selling author, wrote in Epoch Times: “The crux of Kent’s article – satire or not – is that the elite class has a distinct motivation to not end world hunger, because if everyone is well-nourished, there may be no one willing to provide cheap labor and slave away at some of the most physically demanding and unpleasant jobs on the planet.”

Watch the below video about the UN scrubbing Kent’s article “The Benefits Of World Hunger.”

This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com.