In an effort to fight hunger locally and around the world, an SIUC agriculture professor says a panel discussion and a teleconference is scheduled today at the SIUC campus in conjunction with World Food Day.

Gilbert Kroening, coordinator of the event, said he hopes the discussion and teleconference will draw attention to the food problem.

The event hopefully will direct people’s attention to people’s need for food, Kroening, an agriculture professor at SIUC said. Most people think that everyone has food which is not true. I hope this will make our own people aware that the U.S. is not doing as much as it should in helping address this problem.

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The panel discussion will begin at noon in Room 209 of the Agriculture Building with a panel composed of various people involved in the fighting hunger movement. They include, John Colgan, executive director of the Illinois Hunger Coalition; Cathy Morford, of Jackson County Health Department’s Women, Infant and Children Nutrition Program and Maureen Jones, coordinator of SIUC’s Lower Mississippi Delta Child Welfare Initiative.

Kroening said the first hour will consist of a discussion regarding what the state of Illinois and Carbondale are doing to fight hunger.

He said world experts will discuss hunger topics at the teleconference, which will be held at 1 p.m, following panel discussion. The teleconference will also highlight some of the success and failures over the past 50 years in fighting hunger.

Margie Parker, director of the Good Samaritan House Food Pantry at 701 S. Marion in Carbondale, said the event is important because it will call people’s attention to the amount of hunger that exists.

Parker said she believes there is a relatively large number of people in the area who have a problem keeping an adequate supply of food in their homes. She said her facility serves around 120 families per month.

Parker said she believes people tend to forget that there are people going hungry around the world.

I think when we don’t see pictures of starving children in Africa, we tend to forget it goes on regularly, she said. There are still 35,000 children a day that die from hunger-related causes around the world.

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She said these hunger-related diseases include starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition.