Every year, the Bread for the World Institute publishes an annual report on the state of world hunger, the hunger report. As part of the Institute's commitment to anti-hunger education, the report strengthens the anti-hunger movement by analyzing the causes of and solutions to hunger. Executive summaries of the following reports are available online, or order the entire report on our publications page.
Hunger 2008:
Working Harder for Working Families
A scarcity of food is rarely the cause of hunger. There is more than enough food to feed everyone in the United States. The supermarket store shelves are stocked to the ceiling. But none of this matters if families have no money in their pockets. Poverty spoils every meal.
The lone homeless person may be the most conspicuous image of poverty in the national media. Less conspicuous, but a much larger group, are the families who cycle in and out of poverty. Families most at risk are those that are just a little better off than poor, surviving on low-wage jobs until suddenly they lose their financial footing because the main wage earner's job has been eliminated or one of the family members has a medical emergency.
Liberals and conservatives agree, no hard working family should have to raise their children in poverty—and yet the sad truth is that many are. Two-thirds of all children growing up in poverty in the United States have one or more working parents, and one-third have a parent working full-time, year round.
Three decades ago, a low-wage job was enough to lift a family of three out of poverty; today, it scarcely comes close to getting them to the poverty line, and without food assistance and other government support a family struggling to get by in the low-wage economy would be on the absolute edge of desperation. Working Harder for Working Families focuses on families struggling to get by on these kinds of jobs, living in or on the edge of poverty. It recommends policies to support low-wage workers and help them and their families build assets.
No reuse of Hunger Report material is allowed without express consent of BFW
