- As of 2004, 854 million people worldwide suffer from hunger and undernutrition.
(UN Food and Agriculture Organization 2006)
- In the United States, 35 million people—including more than 12 million children—live in households that are at risk of hunger. Of those, nearly 11 million live in households that actually experience hunger. (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2006)
- In the United States, rural people are more likely than their urban counterparts to live in poverty:
- In 2003, 14 percent of the population, or 7.5 million people, living in rural areas were poor. This poverty rate has remained unchanged from 2001 and 2002. The poverty rate in metropolitan areas was 12 percent in 2003. (USDA 2004)
- The 2003 child poverty rate in rural areas was 20 percent, higher than the 17 percent in metro areas. (USDA 2004)
- Poverty rates for African Americans and Native Americans are more than 10 percentage points higher in rural areas than in metro areas. (USDA 2004)
- The poverty rate is highest in counties that are completely rural counties, with 17 percent of the population poor, compared with 12 percent of the population poor in urban counties. (USDA 2004)
- Ninety percent of the counties where 20 percent or more of the populations have lived in poverty over the last 30 years are rural (360 counties of 400). (USDA 2004)
- African American farmers are the principal operators of 29,090 farms (compared to more than 2 million farms operated by white farmers). Latino farmers operate 50,592 farms. Women farmers operate nearly 238,000 farms. (USDA 2002)
- Nearly three-quarters of the world's poor people live in rural areas. Most of these people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. In 2000, more than half (55 percent) of workers in developing countries labored in agriculture. More than two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans were farmers or employed by farmers. (FAO 2001; UN Economic Commission for Africa 2005)
- Eighty percent of the world's hungry people live in rural areas. Smallholder farmers comprise 50 percent; landless people account for roughly 20 percent; and livestock herders, fishers and forest-dependent people make up 10 percent. (UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force 2005)
- Growth in the agricultural sectors of developing countries reduces hunger more effectively than do urban and industrial growth. The countries that made progress during the 1990s toward reaching the hunger Millennium Development Goal were the ones where the agriculture sector grew. (FAO 2005)
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