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Hunger
According to Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2006 statistics, there are 820 million
chronically hungry people in developing countries.
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Sub-Saharan
Africa: 204 million
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Asia/Pacific:
156 million
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India:
221 million
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China:
142 million
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Latin
America/Caribbean: 53 million
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Near
East/North Africa: 39 million
Ten
million people die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases. Only eight
percent are the victims of high-profile earthquakes, floods, droughts and wars.
The rest are often forgotten.
Did
you know that more than 854 million people all over the world know what it means
to go to bed hungry every night? That is more than the combined populations of
the United States, Canada and the European Union. Sadly, about 24,000 people die from the effects
of hunger each day. That's about one person every 3.5 seconds.
Abundance, not
scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other
grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. That
doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods-vegetables, beans, nuts, root
crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at
least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of
grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly
another pound of meat, milk and eggs-enough to make most people fat! The problem
is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food.
Food is always
available for those who can afford it—starvation during hard times hits only
the poorest. Millions live on the brink of disaster in south Asia, Africa and
elsewhere, because they are deprived of land by a powerful few, trapped in the
unremitting grip of debt, or miserably paid.
Hunger Glossary:
nutrition-related terms and definitions
- Hunger
is the body's way of signaling that it is running short of food and needs to
eat something. Hunger can lead to malnutrition
- Undernourishment: describes
the status of people whose food intake does not include enough calories
(energy) to meet minimum physiological needs.The term is a measure of a
country's ability to gain access to food and is normally derived from Food
Balance Sheets prepared by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
- Malnutrition/
Undernutrition:
defined as a state in which the physical function of an individual is
impaired to the point where he or she can no longer maintain natural bodily
capacities such as growth, pregnancy, lactation, learning abilities,
physical work and resisting and recovering from disease.The term covers a
range of problems from being dangerously thin (see Underweight) or too short
(see Stunting) for one's age to being deficient in vitamins and minerals or
being too fat (obese). Malnutrition
is measured not by how much food is eaten but by physical measurements of
the body - weight or height - and age (see Stunting, Wasting, Underweight)
- Stunting: reflects
shortness-for-age; an indicator of chronic malnutrition and calculated by
comparing the height-for-age of a child with a reference population of well
nourished and healthy children. According
to the Food and Agriculture Organization's 2004 report on Food Insecurity,
almost one third of all children are stunted
- Wasting:
reflects a recent and severe process that has led to substantial weight
loss, usually associated with starvation and/or disease. Calculated by
comparing weight-for-height of a child with a reference population of well
nourished and healthy children. Often used to assess the severity of
emergencies because it is strongly related to mortality
- Underweight:
measured by comparing the weight-for-age of a child with a reference
population of well nourished and healthy children.
Hunger
Facts
Source:
FAO & The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2006,Food as Aid: Trends,
Needs and Challenges in the 21st Century
- The number of chronically
hungry people worldwide is growing by an average of four million per year at
current trends
CHILD HUNGER
There
is enough food in the world to feed everyone.
Yet, malnutrition and hunger still afflict one out of every seven people on
earth. Why does hunger exist?
NATURE
Natural disasters such as floods, tropical storms and long periods of drought
are on the increase -- with calamitous consequences for food security in poor,
developing countries. Drought is now the single most common cause of food
shortages in the world. In 2006, recurrent drought caused crop failures and
heavy livestock losses in parts of Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. In many
countries, climate change is exacerbating already adverse natural conditions.
For example, poor farmers in Ethiopia or Guatemala traditionally deal with rain
failure by selling off livestock to cover their losses and pay for food. But
successive years of drought, increasingly common in the Horn of Africa and
Central America, are exhausting their resources.
WAR
Since 1992, the proportion of
short and long-term food crises that can be attributed to human causes has more
than doubled, rising from 15 percent to more than 35 percent. All too often,
these emergencies are triggered by conflict.
From Asia to Africa to Latin
America, fighting displaces millions of people from their homes, leading to some
of the world's worst hunger emergencies. Since 2004, conflict in the Darfur
region of Sudan has uprooted more than a million people, precipitating a major
food crisis -- in an area that had generally enjoyed good rains and crops.
In war, food sometimes becomes a
weapon. Soldiers will starve opponents into submission by seizing or destroying
food and livestock and systematically wrecking local markets. Fields and water
wells are often mined or contaminated, forcing farmers to abandon their land.
When conflict threw Central
Africa into confusion in the 1990s, the proportion of hungry people rose from 53
percent to 58 percent. By comparision, malnutrition is on the retreat in more
peaceful parts of Africa such as Ghana and Malawi.
POVERTY TRAP
In developing countries, farmers
often cannot afford seed to plant the crops that would provide for their
families. Craftsmen lack the means to pay for the tools to ply their trade.
Others have no land or water or education to lay the foundations for a secure
future.
The poverty-stricken do not have
enough money to buy or produce enough food for themselves and their families.
In turn, they tend to be weaker
and cannot produce enough to buy more food.
In short, the poor are hungry and
their hunger traps them in poverty.
AGRICULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE
In the long-term, improved
agricultural output offers the quickest fix for poverty and hunger.
According to the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2004 Food Insecurity Report, all the countries
that are on track to reach the first Millennium Development Goal have something
in common -- significantly better than average agricultural growth.
Yet too many developing countries
lack key agricultural infrastructure, such as enough roads, warehouses and
irrigation. The results are high transport costs, lack of storage facilities and
unreliable water supplies.
All conspire to limit
agricultural yields and access to food.
But, although the majority of developing countries depend on agriculture, their
governments economic planning often emphasises urban development.
OVER-EXPLOITATION OF
ENVIRONMENT
Poor farming practices,
deforestation, overcropping and overgrazing are exhausting the Earth's fertility
and spreading the roots of hunger.
Increasingly, the world's fertile
farmland is under threat from erosion, salination and desertification.
Just
as there is no single cause of hunger, there is no single solution. Aid
organizations around the world try to prevent and alleviate hunger in a variety
of ways, including:
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Protecting
people from famine by giving food to them in emergencies;
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Reducing
poverty by helping poor people find and hold jobs or training them for jobs
where they can make money;
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Providing
information to people about the necessity of a well-balanced diet;
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Making
farming more productive so that there will be more food for the world’s
growing population.
- There
are 854 million undernourished people in the world today and 820 million
live in developing countries. The undernourished have an average deficit
of more than 300 kilocalories per person per day
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- The
largest number of people who suffer nutritional deficiencies live in
Asia and the Pacific region, where poverty, unsafe water and poor
sanitation contribute to poor health
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- In
the Asia and Pacific region 525 million or 17% of the total population
of 3 billion suffer from under-nourishment and the worst hit countries
are North Korea, Mongolia, Cambodia and Bangladesh. In addition, there
are millions of drought-affected people in Tajikistan, Pakistan, Iran,
Armenia and Georgia
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- But
the worst conditions continue to be, largely, in Africa. One out of
every three people in Sub-Sahara Africa is undernourished. High
government debt burdens, inadequate funding for health and education,
pervasive poverty, poor agricultural productivity, weak public
institutionsand the AIDS pandemic all are major causes.
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- In
Sub-Sahara Africa 180 million or 33% of the total population of 539
million suffer from under-nourishment and the worst hit countries
include Angola, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia
and Eritrea.
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- In
the Near East and North Africa, 33 million or 9% of the total population
of 360 million suffer from under-nourishment and the worst hit country
is Afghanistan.
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- In
the Latin America and Caribbean region, 53 million or 11% of the total
population of 481 million suffer from under-nourishment and the worst
hit countries are Haiti, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Honduras.
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- Many
countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe undergoing the
transition from centrally-planned to market-based economies have
experienced economic hardship and rising levels of under-nutrition
during the last decade
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Hunger
persists in the U.S.
- 38.2 million
people—including 13.9 million children—live in households that
experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one
in ten households in the United States (11.9 percent). This is an
increase of 1.9 million, from 36.3, million in 2003.
- 3.9 percent of U.S.
households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently
skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole
day. 10.7 million people, including 545 thousand
children, live in these homes.
- 8.0 percent of U.S.
households are at risk of hunger. Members of these households have lower
quality diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they
cannot always afford the food they need. 27.5 million people, including
10.6 million children, live in these homes.
- Research shows that
preschool and school-aged children who experience severe hunger have
higher levels of chronic illness, anxiety and depression, and behavior
problems than children with no hunger
For More
Information Visit The Following Sites
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