@Gargantua:
And what’s all this Approximately business?
Basically that means YOU MADE IT UP.
No. The approximately part is because there is no body-count done every day accounting every person that has died in ever country from malnutrition or starvation so the best we can do is aggregate statistics over longer periods of time and divide by a given time period to obtain a measure like: X deaths per day/moth/year/hour/second. This is called data analysis and it produces statistics like the one I quoted which comes from the United Nations.
As to the issue of walking to find food or using the plentiful oceans as a source of nutrition: I would consider the fact that roughly 17 000 of these 25 thousand people are children. Most of whom are not aware of the continental pole of inaccessibility, nor their distance from it, nor the obvious bounty of the oceans and the ease with which they may access it nor even which direction they could walk to profit from the cornucopia of food which is every coastline in the world.
But assuming all of the ludicrous claims you made were true, even then, I challenge you to walk 12 hours a day for 21 days straight without food.
Because you think that numbers are your friend, let’s do an experiment.
Let’s assume that this malnourished child begins as a well-fed child, and let’s assume they have no illnesses and were not born infected with HIV, and let’s assume they know how far it is to the ocean and let’s assume they know how to get there and let’s assume there is a safe place for them to sleep whenever they need to and let’s assume there is so severe weather that prevents them from travelling, and let’s assume they have proper footwear to walk 1000 miles and let’s assume that they have access to water throughout their journey, and let’s assume there is a conveniently places bridge over every river, and let’s assume there are no mountains and the shortest distance to the ocean is perfectly flat without obstacles.
All unreasonable, but It would be tedious to defeat every one of those assumptions, so I will just defeat the whole argument.
So this healthy 42lb 6 year old (42 is the average in North America) is aware that they will be starving for the next 21 days and that there is absolutely no chance of eating if they stay where they are, (how they know this we don’t know, but let’s assume) now let’s assume they calculate the distance to the nearest ocean where they can easily eat plenty of food for free and without any knowledge of fishing (because they live 1000 miles from the ocean) So they set out to go there.
You suggested walking 4 miles an hour so that’s how fast she walks. She stays at the free Holiday In every night on the way there where she is rested and ready to walk another 48 miles every day without food or rest.
How many calories will she burn in this trip? Well she will burn at least 1800 calories a day just from having a beating heart and being a child, plus she will burn about 1700 calories a day from all that walking, assuming the ground is perfectly flat. So in total, this person will burn about 3500 calories a day which will cost her about a pound of weight every day for 21 days. Meaning she is going to lose half of her bodyweight in the trip and be 21 pounds by the time she arrives. What is the probability that she will survive this trip without succumbing to exhaustion, infection, or illness or any other of the number of health effects associated with malnutrition? Horrifyingly slim. Which is exactly what a 6 year old that weighs 21 pounds looks like.
The point is that every conceivable factor would have to go right for this plan to work. They can’t get lost, they can’t drown crossing a river. They can’t get bitten by a snake, they can’t get dehydrated, they can’t get infected blisters, they can’t be carrying a sibling etc. etc. AND they have to have the sheer mental and physical capacity to walk for 21 days without taking a break AND be a damn good fisherman!
So for all we know all 17 000 of these children are doing just that!
Except maybe they started off malnourished, or they didn’t know which way to go, or they feared leaving their parents, or they were tending to crops without food for 18 days until locusts ate them and left them without food and only 3 days left until starvation, or there was no water source for3 days of the trip etc. etc. etc.
Or maybe these issues can’t simply be boiled down to walking to the nearest food source.
