Human Rights Activist Examines Poverty, Hunger Issues in Lawrence University Address

APPLETON, WIS. -- Despite one of the longest and strongest periods of economic growth in U.S. history during the 1990s, research indicates the gap between America's rich and poor has actually increased in recent years. Approaching its widest point in nearly half a century, the U.S. gap is the largest among 18 of the world's largest industrialized nations. An estimated 36 million Americans, more than a third of whom are children, are affected by hunger on a daily basis in the United States.

Anuradha Mittal, co-director of Food First, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, will speak on the issue of food as a basic human right and how globalization perpetuates poverty and hunger by exploiting the cheap labor of women and girls, Thursday, May 3 at Lawrence University. Mittal's address, "Economic Human Rights: The Time has Come," is at 7 p.m. in Lawrence's Wriston Art Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Mittal's talk is based on a national education program of the same name she organized. The program led to congressional hearings on poverty and hunger and the loss of family farms in the United States. She has written extensively on free trade issues, women in development and economic human rights and was the co-editor of the 1999 book "America Needs Human Rights."

Educated as a political scientist in India and England, Mittal has taught at the University of California-Berkeley as well as New College of San Francisco.

Founded in 1975, Food First is a California-based, nonprofit think tank and education-for-action center. It works on root causes and value-based solutions to hunger and poverty around the world.