FAM Project

As explained by Quepo, FAM is a project to “Address hunger as the greatest human tragedy of our time. Look at hunger without fear, starting with its structural causes, identifying those directly responsible, and seeking shared collective responsibilities. Report on hunger through multiple narratives via a trans-media universe: a tool for each story, a story for each audience. Transform to eradicate.”

In this post I mentioned how the debate and plans to end hunger have been perversely forgetting to act on the structural and political causes. For a long time the concept of hunger for many in the North has been reduced to an image of a dying African child because of an unavoidable natural catastrophe due to a severe drought. During the Ethiopian 1983-1985 famine the We are the world song along with the news coverage, set a longstanding image of hunger as a charity case. Thirty years after, it seems the way in which we see hunger and its consequences still hasn’t evolved enough for us to decide to attack root causes. I once read that if hunger was contagious we would have eradicated it by now.

This project – that started brewing in Quepo some years ago – “seeks to understand what is happening, why this is happening, to whom this is happening, how are we accepting this, how are we living with this. Do we have anything in common with the people who die from hunger every day? Do they die because of drought and war, which has nothing to do with us? Can we just give money? Why, after so many years of humanitarian aid, are almost one billion people unable to eat and drink enough to stay alive? What other policies perpetuate and worsen this situation?”

I recommend visiting this transmedia project. You can also follow @projecteFAM and its facebook page.