In this blog, I will post some statistics about the problem of world hunger. I hope that these facts and statistics will provide some insight about this problem and that many people benefit from it. World hunger is a very big problem in today’s world. World hunger is an issue that involves people’s health and well-being. Millions of people in the world cannot afford to put food on table to feed their families or themselves. Many of these people go to bed at night without eating anything, because they cannot afford it. A lot of these people get very sick and the eventually die of starvation and malnutrition.

     There are many people who suffer each and every day of their lives, because they cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. Hunger is essentially the most extreme form of poverty because it gets to the point where people cannot afford to meet their most basic need for food. According to the State of Food Insecurity in the world, over nine hundred million people throughout the world are hungry and every day nearly sixteen thousand children die from hunger-related causes. According to stopthehunger.com, there are almost seven billion people in the world and about one billion are undernourished.  Also there are about one billion people who are overweight. This means that one-seventh of the world population is undernourished and one-seventh is overweight. Overall, almost one-third of the world population is malnourished.   This goes to show how big of a problem world hunger is and how much of an affect it has on our world. Over eleven million dollars is spent on food that is purchased and then thrown away by US households each day.  This shows how much money we waste by throwing food away, when we could donate that money or food to the needy. Each day, five hundred thousand dollars is spent on global food aid. It will only take four million dollars to feed the hungry each day. We waste on over eleven million dollars on food that is thrown away, so if everyone donated just one-fourth of the money they waste on food each day then we would be able to feed the hungry.

     According to bread.org, almost three thousand people die of hunger each day and over three hundred thousand people have died of hunger this year. Almost twenty-four million U.S. dollars are spend due to obesity related diseases in the United States today. Over eleven million dollars is spent on food that is purchased and then thrown away by US households each day.  This shows how much money we waste by throwing food away, when we could donate that money or food to the needy. Each day, five hundred thousand dollars is spent on global food aid. It will only take four million dollars to feed the hungry each day. We waste on over eleven million dollars on food that is thrown away, so if everyone donated just one-fourth of the money they waste on food each day then we would be able to feed the hungry. Each day, over fourteen thousand tons of food is wasted in the United States and only about three thousand tons of global food aid is provided each day. Instead of wasting food, I think that we should donate it to the needy. I am sure they will appreciate whatever you can give them.

     Another great website that posts world hunger facts and statistics is thinkquest.org. According to think quest, over five hundred million people in Asian, African, and Latin American countries are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty.” This website also states that every year 15 million children die of hunger. One fact that really interested me was that for the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years.  The World Health Organization estimated that about one-third of the world is fed well, one-third is under-fed, and one-third is hungry and starving. Another interesting fact that really caught my attention was one that stated that since the time that I had entered that site, 200 people have died of hunger and starvation. The site then goes and states that over four million people will die this year. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization one in twelve people worldwide is malnourished.   These days childhood hunger is something that we see on television, and read about in magazines; it’s a epidemic that needs more emphasis to be put into.

     I found another great website that provides some facts about world hunger. This website is called care.org. According to this site, more than 152 million of the world’s malnourished people are children under the age of 5. Another fact that really made me sad was that six million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger. Malnutrition can affect a child’s intellectual development in a very negative way. Many malnourished children have stunted growth and they do not perform well in school, mainly in the subjects of math and language. Although every country in the world has the potential of growing enough food to feed itself, there are 54 countries that currently do not produce a sufficient amount of food to feed their people. These countries cannot even afford to import necessary goods to at least feed the people. Many of these countries are located in the sub-Saharan portion of Africa.

     The website, heartsandminds.org, provides an abundant amount of facts and statistics on the problem of world hunger. According to this site, about 1.2 people struggle to live on less than one dollar each day and a total of 2.7 billion people live on less than two dollars a day. That means over one-third of the entire world populations lives off of less than two dollars each day. Each year, more than ten million children in developing nations die before reaching the age of five. Over half of these deaths are related to malnutrition, which takes the life of a child every five seconds. This fact is similar to the one from care.org, but it is more recent. 

The links to the sources I used are:

http://www.stopthehunger.com/

http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm

http://www.care.org/campaigns/world-hunger/facts.asp

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 6:31 am and is filed under Week 07: Research Stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.