Higher food prices are having an impact in many people’s lives all around the world, but probably more so to those in developing countries. The prices of food just seem to be getting higher and higher. At the beginning of the summer while visiting my parents in Puerto Rico I read about food riots in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I just came back from a short trip to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and that gave me a first hand look at the problem.

While in the Dominican Republic I visited restaurants and supermarkets in Santo Domingo and I was very surprised to find out that the food there was more expensive than in San Juan, Puerto Rico and in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania where I attend college.  The menus of the restaurants I went to had limited alternatives, for example, only one choice for staple, not all places offered bread as part of the meal, limited use of sugar in the food available for selection, basically offering the fruit of the season, in a few creative presentations, as the only alternative for desert. Even the Dominicans’ main staple of their diet, plantain, was not available in supermarkets and was not listed in all restaurants’ menus.  When I pointed this out to a cab driver he told me that bad weather had damaged most of the plantain crop and that the few plantains that were salvaged were sold in the international market to get other products that were needed. I was really surprised about my personal experience because some of the restaurants I visited are places that catered to tourists and had more options than the local restaurants.

The number of children on the street going hungry also shocked me. In the Dominican Republic there are no food stamps. I remember several boys begging and trying to shine your shoes for any money that you would offer them. They appeared to be between 6 and 14 years old, very skinny and some of them had ulcers on their skin. They said that they had to work to put food on their families’ tables. They work as a group.  I do not know if at the end of the day they share their earnings but I had the opportunity to watch them, a group of six or seven of them, walking together and climbing one of the very steep streets of the Colonial Zone area of Santo Domingo, going towards the living quarters surrounding the Colonial Zone, and they were carrying with them plastic bags of just rice and a few green tomatoes. 

If the world poor cannot afford food now, how are they going to be able to afford it when it becomes even scarcer and more expensive? How can we start to take action now to prevent this crisis to become uncontrollable?  I suggest that people like us, who want or need to diet because our caloric intake is too high, on a daily basis donate the equivalent of that extra meal or snack that we are depriving us of to a food bank, or start our own home garden and once we harvest the produce, donate it to a food bank or to a homeless shelter in your town. Hunger is real and is becoming a major challenge.