The World Hunger Problem

According to the World Health Authority the world population is split into thirds, the first third is well-fed, the second third is under-fed and the final third is starving. This means that there are about 800 million people in the world suffering from hunger and malnutrition, which is about 100 times as many as the number who actually die from these problems every year.

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Every three seconds one child dies in Africa today because of the basic lack of safe water, healthcare, shelter or food.

Each year 15 million children die from starvation and 183 million children are underweight for their age. Somebody somewhere in the world dies from hunger every 3.6 seconds. Half of all children under five in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are under nourished. The cost of one missile could give a school full of hungry children a free lunch every day for five years. The cost of ten Stealth bombers or the same amount of money that is spent on the military across the world in two days could prevent the deaths of 100 million children from illness and starvation. More than half the child deaths worldwide are caused by malnutrition; this has not been equalled by an infectious disease since the Black Death.

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In 2005 about 72 million primary school age children in the developing world were not enrolled in school; 57 per cent of them were girls. And these are regarded as optimistic numbers. It would have cost less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons to have every child in school by the year 2000.

Poverty can be defined as trying to live on less than $2 per day. 3 billion people in the world today are trying to do this. But there are 1.3 billion people, nearly one in four, trying to live on less than $1 a day. Rural areas account for three out of every four people living on less than $1 a day and a similar number of the world population are suffering from malnutrition. That is the majority of people who are living now.

World gross domestic product (world population of about 6.5 billion) was $48.2 trillion in 2006. The world’s wealthiest countries (approximately 1 billion people) had $36.6 trillion dollars (76%). The world’s billionaires only 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) had $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP). Low income countries (2.4 billion people) had just $1.6 trillion of GDP (3.3%)

Middle income countries (3 billion people) made up the rest of GDP at just over $10 trillion (20.7%). The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for only 5 percent of global income and the richest 20 percent accounts for a total of three-quarters of world income. About 0.13% of the world’s population controlled only 25% of the world’s financial assets in 2004 whilst 20% of the population in the developed nations consumed 86% of the world’s goods.

Nearly 50% the world’s starving live on the Indian Subcontinent, about 40% live in Africa and the rest of Asia. The remainder live in Latin America and other parts of the world.

It would cost only $13 billion to meet the whole world’s sanitation and food needs, which is the amount that is spent just on perfume every year by the people of the United States and Europe.

In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one in every 6 elderly people in the United States didn’t have an adequate diet.

In the United States hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were continually hungry, and 40% of Latino children were continually hungry compared to 16% of white children.

The infant mortality rate is closely linked to poor nutrition among pregnant women. The United States stands 23rd of the industrial nations for infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants. One in every eight children under the age of twelve in the United States goes to bed hungry every night.