FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is hunger really a problem in the United States?
- Who is going hungry in the U.S.?
- Aren't most of the people going to soup kitchens the ones to blame for their situation?
- If people are willing to work, why are they still at risk of going hungry?
- How does hunger affect children?
- What does the global picture look like?
- How can we prevent starvation, since bad weather and drought are obviously beyond our control?
- A story of hunger in Bangladesh
- A story of hunger in Honduras
- Is it really possible to end hunger in the world?
When Americans think about hunger, we usually think in terms of mass starvation in far-away countries, but hunger too often lurks in our own backyards. In 2006, 35.5 million people, including 12.6 million children, in the United States did not have access to enough food for an active healthy life. Some of these individuals relied on emergency food sources and some experienced hunger. 1
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Although most people think of hungry people and homeless people as the same, the problem of hunger reaches far beyond homelessness. While the thought of 35.5 million people being hungry or at the risk of hunger may be surprising, it is the faces of those 35.5 million individuals that would probably most shock you.
The face of hunger is the older couple who has worked hard for their entire lives only to find their savings wiped out by unavoidable medical bills; or a single mother who has to choose whether the salary from her minimum wage job will go to buy food or pay rent; or a child who struggles to concentrate on his schoolwork because his family couldn’t afford dinner the night before. A December 2006 survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that 48 percent of those requesting emergency food assistance were either children or their parents.2
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Another study, commissioned by America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest network of food banks, found that about 36 percent of households seeking emergency food banks assistance had one or more family member currently employed. 3 Hunger is becoming a growing problem among the working poor.
Although the number of people participating in the Food Stamp Program has risen in recent years, about 40 percent of currently eligible people still do not participate 4, often because of they do not know that they are eligible or face various other barriers to participation. Food banks have had to help fill the gap. Indeed, America’s Second Harvest estimates that they serve over 25 million people per year 5, just about the same as the number of people who receive Food Stamp benefits (25.7 million). 6
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There are various reasons many working Americans are unable to feed their families. From a broader economic perspective, we can point to the fact that the United States has the highest wage inequality of any industrialized nation 7. People can work full-time, low-skill jobs and still not make enough money maintain a basic standard of living-buying food, paying their rent and medical bills, buying clothes for their children and affording a car so that they can travel to work. More than 46 million Americans do not have health insurance. 8
Just providing food seldom gets to the roots of hunger. In the United States, food pantries provide urgently needed help. But food assistance is less important to overcoming hunger than job opportunities. Empowering people, providing them with opportunities or helping them cultivate an awareness of what they can do to improve their lives, is one of the most important ways of overcoming hunger and poverty.
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Children are twice as likely to live in households where someone experiences hunger and food insecurity than adults. One in ten adults compared to one in five children live in households where someone suffers from hunger or food insecurity.
Child poverty is more widespread in the United States than in any other industrialized country; at the same time, the U.S. government spends less than any industrialized country to pull its children out of poverty.
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We have long known that the minds and bodies of small children need adequate food to develop properly. But science is just beginning to understand the full extent of this relationship. As late as the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that only the most severe forms of malnutrition actually alter brain development. The latest empirical evidence, however, shows that even relatively "mild" undernutrition—the kind of hunger we have in the United States—produces cognitive impairments in children which can last a lifetime, according to Dr. J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University.
By taking youngsters and subjecting them to hunger, we rob them of their God-given potential, Dr. Brown continues. "We then deliver them to the schoolhouse door with one arm tied behind their backs and expect teachers to perform an often-impossible task. This, in turn, results in the waste of billions of dollars we invest in the education of our children because hunger prevents so many of them from getting the full value of their educational experience."
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923 million people were undernourished in 2007, of which 907 million people reside in developing countries. According to the most recent FAO estimates, the number of hungry people in the world has increased by 75 million. Rising food prices have hit Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia/Pacific the hardest where the number of hungry people has increased by 24 million and 41 million respectively. The latest FAO report warns that "meeting the internationally agreed hunger-reduction goals in the few years remaining to 2015 is becoming an enormous challenge." FAO has not released revised hunger data for individuals countries, thus it is not possible to determine which countries continue to make progress toward the MDGs.10
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Only a small percentage of hunger deaths are caused by starvation. Most hunger-related deaths are the result of chronic undernutrition, which weakens the body's ability to ward off diseases, prevalent in poverty-stricken communities. Most hungry people have some food, just not enough food or enough of the right kinds of food.
When people actually starve to death—where virtually no food is available—the cause is primarily political, not weather-related. In North Korea, untold millions starved because of the government's unwillingness to give up on failed economic policies. In Sudan, millions are threatened with starvation because of an ongoing military conflict that devastated the country's ability to produce food and because the government restricts the flow of emergency relief.
At the same time India—a country that experiences chronic hunger—has eliminated the threat of famine and mass starvation. Nobel prizewinning economist Amartya Sen explains that "open journalism and adversarial politics" have made it impossible for local governments "to get away with neglecting prompt and extensive anti-famine measures at the first sign of a famine." India's free press and the investigative role played by journalists as well as opposition party members require politicians to prevent and respond to frequent dips in food supply and occasional drought.
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Malekha Khatun's story reflects the situation of many women in developing countries. Born in the village of Dhemsha in Bangladesh, she lost her father, the family's wage-earner, when she was very young. Malekha, her younger brother and mother slept outside since they had no house. In this wet climate, they got soaked when it rained unless someone else offered shelter. Her childhood was spent helping her mother work to earn money, attending a few years of school and witnessing the death of her nine-year-old brother from fever.
At 14, Malekha was married off to a man from another village for a small dowry equaling about nine U.S. dollars. She became pregnant right away and lived with her husband's family, while he left to work as a menial laborer so he could send money back to her and the baby. Upon his return, she became pregnant again. When Malekha's husband left a second time, she received no money or word from him. Left on her own with two small children and no means of income, her youngest child died of malnutrition and diarrhea.
Malekha worked at a variety of jobs in order to support herself, becoming skilled at knitting and making nets. She moved out of the home of her husband's family to live with her mother. Hard work and resourcefulness enabled her to run a small grocery store, but competition caused her business to suffer and she sometimes had to fall back on begging.
Malekha's constant hard work and industriousness could not overcome the poverty and hunger that shadow a woman alone at the bottom rung of an already poor nation. For all her struggling, Malekha ended up with no food to feed herself, no umbrella to protect her from the rain and only one sari to her name. 11
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Ricardo Cabrera lives with his wife and seven children in a small hut in Marcala, Honduras. Cabrera sums up his life: "Yes, I am a poor man. Bastante, bastante, bastante (a lot, a lot, a lot)." To provide a meager living for his family, he works hard in the fields, along with his children. Half the year he works for the large landowners and half the year he works on his own farm growing food for his family and coffee to sell.
Ricardo says, "at the time I was born, people in the mountains were dying of hunger. I had three brothers and a sister; two brothers died of fever. My parents worked from six in the morning to six in the evening. It's the rich who don't work."
When he was 21 and newly married, Ricardo was drafted into the army. After taxes, food money, clothes and medicine were subtracted from his pay, he had only 25 cents a month to send home to his new wife. He has worked hard to get to where he is today, though he is still, as he says, a poor man.
"Make no mistake," Ricardo says. My people and I don't want any sweet music. We want our children to be educated, we want to know how to farm better. We don't want to be cheated" 12
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Hunger does not exist because the world does not produce enough food. We have the experience and the technology right now to end the problem. The challenge we face is not production of food and wealth, but more equitable distribution.
It would take a modest effort to end hunger and malnutrition worldwide. Hunger is a political condition. And so the key to overcoming hunger is to change the politics of hunger.
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Sources:
1 Household Food Security in the United States, 2005. USDA Economic Research Service. November 2006.
2 Hunger and Homelessness Survey 2006. US Conference of Mayors. December 2006.
3Hunger in America 2006. America's Second Harvest. March 2006.
4 “Food Stamp Program Average Monthy Participation." USDA Food and Nutrition Service. 24 November 2006.
5 “Who We Help.” America’s Second Harvest.
6 "Food Stamp Participation Rates: 2004 Summary." USDA Food and Nutrition Service. June 2006.
7 Mishel, Lawrence, Bernstein, Jared, & Sylvia Allegreto. The State of Working America 2004/2005. Economic Policy Institute. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
8 Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States. US Census Bureau. August 2006.
9 The State of Working America 2006/2007. The Economic Policy Institute. January 2007.
10 “Briefing Paper Hunger on the Rise: Soaring Prices Add 75 Million People to Global Hunger Rolls.” Food and Agriculture Organization. 17 September 2008.
11 Leckman, Scott A. "Grameen Bank Borrowers." Pearls of Bangladesh. RESULTS Educational Fund. 1993.
12 Richards, Eugene. "The Forgotten Ones." Choices, The Human Development Magazine. April 1998.
Page last updated: October 1, 2008
