Enrique's Journey Essay

Oxfam, the international charity that works to right the wrongs of poverty, hunger, and injustice, states that “The obligation of States to respect, protect and fulfil the Right to Food as a fundamental human right requires the appropriate policy initiatives. As such, its legal recognition is a necessary –though insufficient - step in its fulfilment and provides the framework for justiciability.” I felt that the human Rights issue that was highlighted in the book Enrique’s Journey was the one of the right of access to adequate food. In the book, the mother Lourdes, leaves Honduras to make the trek to illegally work in the United States and earn money to send back to her family because “Lourdes can barely afford food for Enrique and his sister Belky.”.(p20). In Honduras the world food program runs an initiative where smallholders provide food for the school meals program, providing 1.4 million school children with a meal every day. However, many young children in
Haiti has often been used as a dumping ground for US agriculture surplus. In the 1990’s the Haitian government, in desperation to feed its people, conceded to pressure from the United States to drop its import taxes on rice to nearly zero. This led to a flood of foreign rice into the Haitian market, mostly from the US, causing Haitian rice production to plummet because it was not profitable for the farmers of Haiti to grow their own rice against this cheap foreign import, so the country now imports 80% of its rice. This year the US Department of Agriculture plans to repeat the operation by shipping 500 metric tons of their surplus packaged, dry roasted peanuts to Haiti. I suggest that it be better for the United States to help Haitian farmers boost their own peanut