WANTING A MEAL
Photographer Haunted by Horror of His Work
Obituary: Kevin Carter 1960 - 1994
Johannesburg - Kevin Carter, the South African photographer whose image of a
starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture won him a Pulitzer Prize this
year, was found dead on Wednesday night, apparently a suicide, police said
yesterday. He was 33. The police said Mr Carter's body and several letters to
friends and family were discovered in his pick-up truck, parked in a
Johannesburg suburb. An inquest showed that he had died of carbon monoxide
poisoning. Mr Carter started as a sports photographer in 1983 but soon moved to
the front lines of South African political strife, recording images of
repression, anti-apartheid protest and fratricidal violence. A few davs after
winning his Pulitzer Prize in April, Mr Carter was nearby when one of his
closest friends and professional companions, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead
photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township. Friends said Mr Carter was a man
of tumultuous emotions which brought passion to his work but also drove him to
extremes of elation and depression. Last year, saying he needed a break from
South Africa's turmoil, he paid his own way to the southern Sudan to photograph
a civil war and famine that he felt the world was overlooking. His picture of an
emaciated girl collapsing on the way to a feeding centre, as a plump vulture
lurked in the background, was published first in The New York Times and The Mail
& Guardian, a Johannesburg weekly. The reaction to the picture was so strong
that The New York Times published an unusual editor's note on the fate of the
girl. Mr Carter said she resumed her trek to the feeding centre. He chased away
the vulture. Afterwards, he told an interviewer, he sat under a tree for a long
time, "smoking cigarettes and crying". His father, Mr Jimmy Carter laid last
night: "Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did." - The New
York Times
Feed The Hungry
There... is enough food to feed everyone.
All over the world, hundreds of millions of people go hungry every day because
much of the land is being used to grow feed grain for animals rather than food
grain for people. The wealthiest people on the planet in turn, are consuming
grain-fed cattle, pigs, chickens, milk and eggs, while the poor go hungry.
A child starves to death every 2 seconds. 40,000 people starve to death every
day while their governments ship grain to the U.S. to feed pigs, cows and
chickens so that we may satisfy our desire for flesh, milk and eggs.
If everyone in the world ate like people in the U.S. do, only 2.5 billion
people could be sustained. The current world population is 6.3 billion and is
expected to be over 9 billion by 2050. If everyone ate a Vegan diet, at least 20
billion people could be sustained.
During the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, and during the famine in
Somalia in the early 1990s, those countries continued to export grain to Europe
to feed its cows, pigs, and chickens so that Europeans could eat animal
products. Millions of people suffer, starve and die every year in Central and
South America as those countries ship their grains to the U.S. to feed cows,
pigs, and chickens so that we can satisfy our desire for animal products.
The World Health Organization has called for a shift away from meat
production so that people can consume crops directly stating, �Farming policies
that do not require intensive animal production systems would reduce the world
demand for cereals. Use of land could be reappraised since cereal consumption
for direct consumption by the population is much more efficient and cheaper than
dedicating large areas to growing feed for meat production and dairying.
Policies should be geared to the growing of plant foods and to limiting the
promotion of meat and dairy.�
Governments worldwide have ignored this call for compassion. Instead of
promoting the growing of plant-based foods, government subsidies and financial
incentives are given to animal farmers -- actively encouraging meat/dairy/egg
production.
VeganFuture.org
