The Importance Of Hunger

More than 1 billion people in the world right now are suffering from hunger. Food security is “the access by all people at all times to the food needed for a healthy life,” as defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. There are four points to food security, which are “availability, access, utilization, and stability.” When one or even all these points are missing, it is described as food insecurity. The rise of food prices in 2008 shocked and affected millions of people, many of whom were very poor. Because of the rise of food prices, there were protests and hunger was put at the top of the list, although it did not stay there. Science has to understand how to deal with hunger as the problem grows. Using scientific research and changing policies can have a huge impact on the issue of hunger. Population is

After reading the extensive “The New Face of Hunger” (Tracie McMillan), my eyes became more open to the overall issue of hunger, faced by many people today. In a few words, I was absolutely shocked by the true meaning and examples provided of what exactly food insecurity is. Honestly speaking, when I hear the word “hunger” I think of a human who has no food, living on the streets. “The New Face of hunger” brought to my attention that food insecurity is much more than simply having no food. In fact, “In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat” (The New Face of Hunger). Not only was I able to see the harsh

“Hunger”, by Lan Samantha Chang, is a cautionary tale of an immigrant Chinese family in this complex story about unrelenting hunger, oppression, love and loss. Narrated by Min; the deeply unhappy and obedient wife of Tian, a gifted violinist, finds work as a music teacher in New York, but ultimately fails to land a permanent job at the school. Driven by personal failure and his unrelenting hunger for the violin Tian cruelly forces his two daughters, Anna and Ruth to play the violin, so they can follow in his footsteps. Tian’s inability to separate himself from his violin ends up destroying his family. Chang uses Tian’s obsessive hunger for the violin as a symbol of his identity, showing us that we must be careful

“Over 100,000 children under five suffer from acute malnutrition while one child out of three is stunted, or irreversibly short for their age.”(“Hunger”) This staggering statistic is due to one of the world’s biggest problems, hunger. Hunger is a problem that many developing countries face, one of the biggest victims to hunger is the small Caribbean country of Haiti. Hunger in Haiti affects the entire country, from the rural countrysides to the major cities. Though hunger is already a big issue for Haiti, it has gotten worse in the past decade due to the extreme poverty, heavy storms, and natural disasters that the country has faced. “In 1997 some 1.2 million Haitians didn 't have enough food to eat. A decade later the number had more than doubled. Today, that figure is 6.7 million, that goes without food some days, can 't afford a balanced diet or has limited access to food.”(“Goldberg”) Natural disasters and extreme poverty have played large roles in Haiti’s growing hunger problem.

Richard Robbins explores and analyzes the creation and the upkeep of hunger in his book “Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Each day, over a billion people in the world lack basic food needs. Common misunderstandings about world hunger are that it is the result of insufficient food production, famine is the common reason for hunger and that hunger is caused by overpopulation. Robbins argues against that theory and says that famines is not the leading cause of hunger and hunger is not due to overpopulation or insufficient food production. “Food production is not determined by the global need for food; it is determined on how many people have the means for it” (page 176). The documentary “The End of Poverty” reinforces Robbins belief that food is a commodity.

While most reports highlights the severity of hunger in many developing nations, many suffering from hunger can happen in our backyard too. In the US, prolific families suffering from malnourishment and food insecurity makes up 12.7%

Hunger in America, 2014: Executive Summary by Feeding America discusses hungry in communities and the food banks they depend on. The Executive Summary provides comprehensive demographic profiles of people seeking food assistance through the charitable sector. In addition, an in-depth analyses of the partner agencies in the Feeding America network. In Divided we Eat by Lisa Miller, she explores how to close the gap between the food passionate and the food insecure. Miller struggles to explain why people are willing to indulge themselves with the best food product while others struggle to get a balanced meal. World Hunger, Ten Myths by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins tackles the myths behind global hunger. Lappe and Collins suggest that

Worldwide hunger affects almost one billion people throughout the world. (“Nutrition”) Malnutrition that is caused by hunger is the main killer of people who

Hunger stalks America and many other countries. How the world deals with hunger is dependent on cultural attitudes and the understanding of what hunger means to the individual and communities. In the United States, the majority of hungry people are the elderly, children, and the disabled which represent a bloc of people unable to provide for themselves with employment. The understanding that governmental systems and institutions responsible for food insecurity are failing, is becoming mainstream in the population, not the previous idea that agriculture does not produce enough food. How to provide physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to meet dietary needs and food preferences for healthy lives is a problem of political and economic exclusion, social injustice and discrimination (Cunningham 2017, Lecture 1). The right to food security should be an uncompromised right of humanity, no matter the cost to government or agriculture.

Food is a necessary part of ever individual’s daily life. Without food, the body cannot function properly, resulting in poor health, exhaustion, and even death by starvation. Therefore, food insecurity continues to be an international global epidemic. The journal article by Harrigan suggests that the citizens of the Sub-Saharan African country of Malawia are in further poverty due to their lack of food and agricultural resources. The newspaper article from the Guardian tells the real life story of African citizens struggling to farm and find food due to the crop shortages that have spanned Africa for the past two years. This is a current global issue, and the journal and news article prove that there is much to be done in order to help restore

In the past ten years the world population exceeded six billion people with most of the growth occurring in the poorest, least developed countries in the world. The rapidly increasing population and the quickly declining amount of land are relative and the rate at which hunger is increasing rises with each passing year. We cannot afford to continue to expand our world population at such an alarming rate, for already we are suffering the consequences. Hunger has been a problem for our world for thousands of years. But now that we have the technology and knowledge to stamp it out, time is running short.

As we have seen for decades, world hunger has been a chilling epidemic affecting over 925 million people, but it has little to do with food shortages. (“World Hunger Facts”, Page 1) By definition, world hunger is the want or scarcity of food in a country (Page 1). Undernourishment affects people’s health, productivity, sense of hope, and overall well being in a negative manner. The lack of food can stunt growth, slow thinking, sap energy, hinder fetal development and contribute to mental retardation. (Page 1) Undernourished pregnant women die during birth, 315,000 mothers a year. More than half of the deaths in children in 2010 were caused by poor nutrition. That’s 3.8 million children. This year around 6 million children will die from starvation. ("Forks Over Knives | Animal Agriculture, Hunger, and How to Feed a Growing Global Population: Part One of Two.", Page 1) These statistics are unbelievable considering that the world produces one and a half

Ed Asner once said, “There are genuinely sufficient resources in the world to ensure that no one, nowhere, at no time should go hungry”. Hunger can be defined as “a shortage of food; famine” but across the world it has more serious and genuine connotations. Hunger is painful, degrading, and seemingly hopeless for all within its depths. Each hour more than three hundred children die of hunger in third world countries. An epidemic is the “rapid spread or increase in the occurrence of something”. The epidemic of hunger is one that costs the world seventy-seven billon dollars in national income lost each year.

Today, the economic state of our world is highly connected and international. Therefore, the global market influences food accessibility and hunger on an exceedingly large scale. The global food economy exists within a complex system that has widespread dire consequences if it finds itself in a crisis like we are currently seeing. While it is a common perception that the global food crisis is occurring due to shortages in supply and increasing demand, nearly a billion people are now malnourished or starving due to financial speculation and a legacy of events put into motion by the industrialized world. The high price of food has the largest impact on global hunger and those in the developing world are most vulnerable to food crises exposure. Because people need food to survive, it will require the interpretation of a very large number of people and opinions to fully resolve this problem – some of whom do not exist yet to speak for themselves. The myriad of international stakeholders in this issue have the ability to self-organize and adapt based on their experiences and this will produce emergent outcomes and nonlinear behavior among the global food economy – turning the coordination of a resolution into a continuous project.

Many countries are facing the burden of hunger and undernutrition/malnutrition. Tackling hunger is one of the greatest challenges of the times. Hunger is triggered by multiple dimensions and causes,