Understanding Hunger

"Hunger is not a question of fate, but a result of action or inaction."
~Jean Ziegler, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

It is unacceptable that a significant number of the world's population, particularly women and children, suffer from the scourge of hunger and malnutrition in a world capable of feeding everybody. Too many people in the world die for the lack of food and clean water, the basic yet fundamental necessities for life. The first step to ending this global crisis is to understand what hunger is, who it affects, and why it exists in a world of plenty. 

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The Scope of Hunger in the World

• Over 850 million people around the world, or 13% of the world's population, suffer from hunger and malnutrition.
• 820 million of the world's hungry reside in the developing world, amounting to more than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union.
• 10 million people die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases, over half of whom are children. This is one child every five seconds.
• More than 60% of the world's chroncially hungry are women.
• The number of chronically hungry people worldwide is growing by an average of four million per year at current trends.

Source: FAO & The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2006

• But hunger is not an inevitability. We know how to end hunger in the world, and we have the obligation to do so.

Water Insecurity and Hunger
Water scarcity and pollution are two main factors that help create and exacerbate global hunger. Without access to clean water, crops cannot be sufficiently cultivated for food and the body cannot maintain health. People cannot survive more than a few days without drinking water. Yet:

• More than one billion people lack access to a safe supply of drinking water.
• 2.4 million people, or approximately 50% of the world's population, do not have access to basic sanitation facilities.
• Water-related diseases are one of the leading causes of disease and death in the world.
• 88% of all diseases are caused by unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
• The average American individual uses 100 to 176 gallons of water at home each day. The average African family uses about 5 gallons of water each day.

Source: Water Partners International

The Right to Food

According to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler:

The right to food is a human right that protects the right of all human beings to live in dignity, free from hunger. It is protected under international human rights and humanitarian law. As defined by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its General Comment No. 12 (1999), “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement”.

The right to food is, above all, the right to be able to feed oneself in dignity. The right to food includes the right to have access to the resources and to the means to ensure and produce one’s own subsistence, including land, small-scale irrigation and seeds, credit, technology and local and regional markets, especially in rural areas and for vulnerable and discriminated groups, traditional fishing areas, a sufficient income to enable one to live in dignity, including for rural and industrial workers, and access to social security and social assistance for the most deprived. The right to food also includes the right to have access to safe drinking water.

Source: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, 10 January 2008.

Defining Hunger

In order to help fight global hunger, you should first know what hunger means. Many words that describe global hunger or malnutrition are often incorrectly used interchangeably. We use the following definitions when talking about our work against hunger:

• Hunger: Although "hunger" has a subjective sense - one can be hungry but well fed, or on the other hand, a malnourished child may feel no hunger - Action Against Hunger uses "hunger" to denote its more objective sense: Hunger is any caloric intake below the minimum established by the U.N. World Food Program of 2000 calories/day.
• Famine: Is the absolute unavailability or inaccessibility of food in a given region, possibly causing death in the short term.
• Malnutrition: Is a broad term for a wide range of conditions that hinder good health, caused by an inadequate or unbalanced food intake.
• Chronic malnutrition: Is a condition that usually occurs gradually and can last generations. Chronic malnutrition is common in developing countries and is the consequence of an unbalanced diet lacking in fundamental nutrients and leading to nutritional deficiency.
• Acute malnutrition: Is a condition that occurs suddenly and to a dangerous extent as the result of a severe lack of food. Acute malnutrition provokes diseases and leads to death if intense treatment is not administered immediately. Acute malnutrition can take two forms: moderate or severe malnutrition.
• Food security: Is a situation during which all people, at all times, have access economically, socially and physically to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that satisfies their nutritional needs and dietary preferences. Food insecurity is the lack of the conditions that define food security.

Causes of Global Hunger

The Scarcity Myth
It is a commonly held belief that the world lacks the resources and ability to feed the world's population. This belief is a misconception. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there is more than enough food to feed every person on the planet.

In fact, over the past 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2.0% a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.14% a year. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are currently produced to provide each person approximately 2700 calories a day. This excludes other foods that comprise a well-rounded diet, for example--vegetables, beans, fruit, grass-fed meat, and fish. With these foods factored in, hunger should not be a problem in the world. Nonetheless, over 850 million people remain chronically food insecure. Why?

Why Hunger in a World of Plenty?

Poverty
In a world capable of feeding every man, woman and child, poverty is the overarching explanation for why hunger exists in the world. The causes of hunger are intricately related to the indignity of poverty. In any country, developing or developed, poverty renders the poor most vulnerable to disruptions in local and global food supplies. These disruptions can be characterized as the immediate causes of hunger, which include:

Conflict and war
Fighting during a conflict or war often results in the destabilization and displacement of populations, uprooting communities from their homes and rendering the poor extremely food insecure. While wealthier families displaced by conflicts can settle somewhere safe to wait for the conflict to subside and can buy food to subsist, the poor do not have these luxuries. Rather, the displaced poor often become homeless and without the means to buy food for survival. Hunger and malnutrition among the poor in conflict-ridden regions become rampant and dire, especially among women and children.

The international community has begun to recognize the world’s moral obligation to help the poor in need, particularly the poor displaced by conflict and wars not of their own making. Humanitarian aid organizations work in concert to provide emergency aid and security for internally-displaced peoples (IDPs) in conflict regions, which helps to temporarily keep hunger and malnutrition at bay. However, as long as a conflict or war persists, the displaced poor will remain food insecure and at risk for hunger and malnutrition in the long term.

Environmental disasters
Natural disasters such as the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and drought and floods in other instances have catastrophic effects on the food security of poor developing countries. Earthquakes, tsunamis and other cataclysmic environmental disasters displace poor populations much like conflicts and wars do and render the displaced food insecure until the reconstruction of their lost communities. Droughts and floods may be less destructive than their more severe counterparts, however, they can effectively wipe out a region’s season of crops or exhaust the natural resources of the land needed to cultivate food for a population. When unforeseen disasters strike the poor, hunger and malnutrition often follow.

(to be continued...)