Rice fields with a new gene are tested for flood tolerance in Los Banos, Philippines. (File photo: Ariel Javellana/International Rice Research Institute)

Say you’re the president of a first-world, industrialized country, and you’ve been told that almost all of China’s food supply has been wiped out. That means that one billion people are going hungry. Would you rush to China’s aid?

The United Nations World Food Programme just announced that for the first time this year, one billion people are expected to go hungry. Given that these people aren’t all in one first-world country, it’s not surprising that this news has been downplayed. It also tells me that our priorities are, to put it very lightly, skewered.

On the same day this was announced, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social networking Web site Facebook, announced that the site has added its 300 millionth member. That figure is nearly the entire population of the United States.

That tells me that 300 million people can in fact come together for one reason. If almost the entire U.S. population dropped everything and donated to food shelters, a good part of that 1 billion would cry tears of joy for weeks.

But the world, sadly, doesn’t work that way. "Millions have been buffeted by the global financial downturn, their ability to buy food is limited by stubbornly high prices. In addition, unpredictable weather patterns are causing more weather-related hunger," the WFP said, according to Reuters.

WFP has told us how this has happened, but now we need to move on to push that figure down. We need to give what we can; we needed to do it yesterday. Even if it’s just a dollar, a Euro, a pound, you’d be amazed what that can buy in any country. There has to be some unexpired food lurking around your house that you won’t eat anyway. For businesses, it’s as simple as taking a cardboard box, taping a scrap sheet “FOOD DRIVE” sign to it, and putting it up front. Most regions have nearby food shelters.

Last weekend, Dr. Norman Borlaug, an American scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, died at the age of 95. In the mid-20th century, Borlaug introduced high-yield, disease-resistant types of wheat to Mexico, the Middle East and Asia. This development exponentially increased grain production in these countries.

Borlaug is credited today with saving the lives of a billion people as a result. Therein lays a strange irony that one billion were able to eat as a result of one person’s research, and yet, there are still one billion hungry.

However, Borlaug proves that one person can in fact help the hungry. So the rest of us have no excuses.

Here are some places to start:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Issues_and_Causes/Poverty/Hunger/Organizations/