TED@UPS: The Key to Solving Hunger

Esther Ndichu | UPS 

Summary:

From the air, Dadaab isn’t visible – and then it slowly comes into focus. The huge empty expanse of red dust looks like a terracotta platter dotted with pepper. But as you draw closer, the black specks grow and change color, and the bare platter fills.

As we begin our descent it becomes clear that this arid expanse of white, blue and brown is actually a vast expanse of tents. Row upon row.

An area designed for 90,000 is now home to nearly half a million people.Effectively, a city as large as Miami. But this is not a city in the conventional sense – this is Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world, a place where hunger is rampant.

But hunger isn’t exclusive to refugee camps; it is a global epidemic. There are nearly 800 million hungry people in the world, and more than 18 million of them live in places like North America, Europe and Australia.

But when many people think about hunger, we often think the problem is a lack of food. Ironically, that’s not the problem at all. There’s actually enough food available to feed all the people in the world.

The real problem is a lack of logistics. Watch my TED Talk to see how logistics can help solve this complex problem.

Click here to learn more about Esther.

Esther Ndichu is director of the UPS Humanitarian Supply Chain. She is based in Brussels.

Reprinted with permission of Longitudes, the UPS blog devoted to the trends shaping the global economy.