I love good food
I was recently in New York City vacationing and enjoying wonderful food at great restaurants. Places where there 1,000+ www.yelp.com reviews. Italian ravioli, Japanese ramen, Korean pork belly buns, tuna tartare, lox and bagels etc. . .
While there, we visited the United Nations and learned about the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to reduce poverty and hunger (among 7-8 other goals). Ambitious goals agreed to by 190+ countries. It made me reflect on the question:
How many hungry people are there?
According to the State of Food Insecurity in the World, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) of the United Nations, there are 870 million undernourished people, or 13% of the global population. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these people are in the developing world. In the graph below, the total number of undernourished people has fallen from about 980 million in the 20 years ago to about 850 million in the developing world now.
The greatest need is in Asia and Africa
Breaking down the 850 million by region, it looks like Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa is where the need is the greatest. The good news is that Asia is more prosperous and the number of undernourished fell 27%. I imagine a lot of this has to do with the prosperity in China and India. The bad news is that Africa is going in the wrong direction. They had 170 million hungry in 1990, now they have 234 million in 2012.
Sadly, many of the hungry are children
The 2012 Hunger Report is the most comprehensive study I saw. Some of it is hard to read because you run across trivia like this: “One-third of all children in Asia are underweight.” Wow. Don’t all kids deserve a chance to grow up healthy, study and make something of themselves? Looking at this chart, you can see that poor children in the developing world have stunted growth because of a lack of safe drinking water, and sufficiency calories.
I am sure you don’t need more proof of the tragedy this is for kids, but The The Hunger Project published some of these startling statistics:
- 60 percent of the world’s hungry are women
- 1 out of 6 infants are born with a low birth weight in developing countries
- Malnutrition contributes to one-third of all child deaths (2.6 million annually)
- Every five seconds, a child dies from hunger-related diseases
Americans are food insecure too
The US government defined food security as “access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle”. While the definition is certainly different from the FAO, I believe the heart of it is the same. If you don’t have enough to eat, or cannot afford to get the right balance of food, you have food insecurity.
Feed America, a national non-profit, published a report which included 61,000 face-to-face interviews and 37,000 surveys of soup kitchens and charitable organizations. They showed that approximately 37 million (not double counted) Americans go hungry. That is frightening to think that almost 1 in 9 Americans don’t have enough to eat.
It starts with poverty
There are multiple reasons that an American goes hungry, but at its core, it is about poverty. Right now, there are approximately 46 million Americans who live in poverty. This creates a downward cycle of poverty – lack of education – hunger etc.
Hunger costs the US $165 billion annually
A team of economists from Brandeis University calculated that the US loses about $165 billion in lost education, health and productivity because of hunger here. They equate that to approximately $542 impact for every American. Beyond the moral and humanist responsibility to feed the hungry, perhaps we can no longer “afford” for people to go hungry.
In summary, I am a foodie. I believe all people should have food.