In 2015, researchers asked a group of children that belonged to low income families to describe in words a certain sensation that that particular group of children knew well. Children overall mentioned fatigue, loss of motivation, and painful stomach aches. One girl described the sensation as sad, and that she felt like crying as the sensation took its course. Another boy said that he would drink heaps of water to alleviate its adverse effects. No child had something pleasant to say regarding the sensation.
Hunger, a feeling of discomfort caused by a lack of food, was the sensation that the children alluded to. The children used in the research lived in New Jersey, a region of high food insecurity, not only for children, but also for adults. It would be idyllic to say that food insecurity is exclusive to the New Jersey area, however, that is not the case. Food insecurity is not something only found within the confines of New Jersey, or even the United States. Food insecurity ravages more than 4 continents, affecting almost 795 million people who often do not have a choice in changing their circumstances.
Lack of nourishment is also one of the leading causes of disease in third world countries, accounting for millions of deaths annually. For this reason, the area of human endeavor in which progress is the most important is providing total access to food in the next 20 – 50 years. While the food crisis is accredited to various causes, warfare and unshakeable cycles of poverty often aggravate the issue of world hunger. Unfortunately, such causes are often out of the hands of those affected by hunger.
Warfare, in particular, is often a regional issue in developing countries that minorities violently provoke, and majorities helplessly watch. A clear example of conflict hindering the access of food can be found in South Sudan, where two ethnic groups have began grappling for power since 2013. Civil war in South Sudan has not only been the cause of nearly 50,000 casualties, but also a great exacerbation to the already desperate hunger situation in Sudan, which is 7 million Sudanians strong. Armed groups have threatened to cut off the main road that connects North and South Sudan, cutting off food supplies entirely.
Sudanians are unable to plant crops because of the ongoing war and cannot receive the necessary humanitarian assistance out of the fear that they or the ones helping them will be targeted by the enemy. Much of the assistance that actually passes through is given to war supporters, not to the hungry masses. The case of South Sudan is one of the many cases of warfare interfering with food security. Around the world, hunger is also maliciously used as a weapon. Soldiers have been reported to have seized food and livestock to starve their opponents into submission.
One man, after living through the cruel civil war in Liberia, knew that peace had come when he saw the livestock return to people’s farms. During the war, rebels had seized the livestock, leaving their victims to go hungry. War also affects the land its taking place on. Potential farmland is often mined leaving farmers landless, disrupting vital food production that eventually spans to chronic food deficits. Victims are forcibly displaced from their homes and robbed of their possessions. Warfare, in the end, leaves those in the wake of it, with little means to recover from hunger.
Poverty, in the same way as warfare, leaves those in its cycle, unable to escape hunger. Poverty encompasses nearly of half of the world’s population; 3 billion people earning less than $2. 50 a day, and almost 1. 4 billion who earn less than $1. 50. Such a quantity is not enough to feed one person sufficiently, much less a family with more than two children, which is the standard for Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Of course, not all poor people are hungry, however, almost all hungry people are poor.
Thus, it is not surprising that some of the poorest nations have the highest hunger rates, including Burundi, that ranks second in lowest GDP per capita and a 73. 4% rate of undernourishment, and Malawi, a nation where 53% of the population falls below the poverty line and 20% of Malawians are subject to acute food insecurity. The cycle of poverty shackles people into hunger simply because they cannot afford food for themselves or their families. This makes those affected weaker, more vulnerable to disease, and unable to earn the money that would help them break out of poverty and hunger.
Poverty not only fetters the adults within it, but more so the children caught in the aftermath. Children who suffer malnourishment in their childhoods develop improperly and become more likely to develop chronic diseases in their adulthoods that eventually impedes them from making the economic progress like their parents before them. Poverty condemns them a life filled with hunger and limited ways of escape. In short, present hunger affects future income. Acting together, high poverty rates and insurgentalist warfare in developing nations have certainly intensified the crisis to the conditions in which they are in today.
When one envisions the hungry, images of bony legs and arms, palpably seen rib cages, lifeless eyes, and dirt-covered faces, often come to mind. Though this images are the ones commonly associated with hunger, they only reveal the conspicuous side of the hunger. That is not to say that such images are not relevant today, because they are. Hunger is a cause of the features beforementioned, but more often then not, hunger takes its toll on the inside rather than the outside, through disease and a heap of other negative health effects.
Diseases that include, but are not limited to anaemia and overall malnutrition. In a policy briefing, the World Health Organization defined anaemia as, “a condition in which the number of red blood cells, falls below an established cut-off value, consequently impairing the capacity of the blood to transport oxygen around the body. ” Anaemia affected more than 528 million pregnant and nonpregnant women worldwide ranging from ages 15 to 49 in 2011. While the causes of anaemia vary, iron deficiency is attributed as the most common cause, resulting from a poor diet lacking in nutrients.
Women diagnosed with anaemia are subject to lethargy, spells of fatigue, impaired physical activity, and work performance, which then adversely affects the economy. Cognitive and motor development are also infiltrated by the disease, as well as the cardiovascular system. Because the disease impairs the capacity for the transportation of oxygen, anaemia-affected hearts often have to pump more blood to compensate for the lack of oxygen, which foreshadows future congestive heart failure.
In pregnant women, anaemia is linked to low birth weights and a heightened likelihood of maternal and perinatal mortality, which in developing nations contributed almost 3 million deaths in 2013, in addition to to the 90,000 nonpregnant women. Malnutrition acts in the same way as anaemia, however, its harmful effects extend unto children. Malnutrition is the lack of proper nutrition either caused by scant food intake, or a lack of nutritious food intake. Hunger and malnutrition are different in that one causes the other.
Hunger is temporary, as it involves missing a meal, on certain occasions, but it slowly converts into malnutrition after prolonged periods of hunger. In Stuart Gillespie, Milla McLachlan, and Roger Shrimpton’s Combating Malnutrition: Time to Act, the authors report that, “Malnutrition implicated in half of all child deaths, also causes considerable illness and cognitive underdevelopment,” (Gillespie, McLachlan, and Shrimpton 3). Malnutrition attacks the brain, delaying the development of reading, language, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills.
A reason for this is because the thousand day window between a mother’s pregnancy and the child’s second birthday is a pivotal time for brain development. Hence, if parents are not able to give adequate nourishment for the child during the window, the child becomes at risk for a slew of behavioral disorders, health issues, and learning disabilities. In a study conducted by the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, researcher Sally Grantham-McGregor noted that the malnourished children in the study were more apathetic, less active and explored their environments less.
McGregor also studied formerly malnourished children and found that they had shorter attention spans, poorer grades, and lacked a comprehensive range of cognitive functions. Malnutrition, as mentioned before, also leaves children more vulnerable to stunting, weight loss, and other diseases such as pneumonia, measles, malaria, and diarrhoea. When the children affected by malnutrition grow up, they become adults still plagued with the effects of their prolonged hunger as children. For anaemia and malnutrition, in most cases, a nutrient rich diet would suffice to end the diseases that account for more than 21,000 deaths daily.
Furthermore, providing easier access to food would not only satisfy hunger, but would also raise standard of living and equalize developing nations to other Western countries. One of the key elements bogging down standard of living in nations is hunger. As before mentioned, hunger leaves those affected, weaker, and more vulnerable to disease, therefore less economic activity goes into these nations. The governments of developing nations, as a result, lack the necessary funds to invest in what many other Western countries have been investing in for decades.
For example, in 2014, developing nation Nigeria only devoted 0. 9% of the GDP to healthcare, while the United States invested 8. 3%, While it is not fair to compare two differing countries…. Countries that invest more heavily in areas such as healthcare, education, housing, etc. are more likely to have higher standard of livings. Therefore, when a country lags behind economically because of hunger, such countries cannot invest in life-changing necessities like healthcare, education, and housing that might raise their standard of living.
However, if these nations were to receive the necessary aid, many people would spend less time trying to find sources of food, and more time actually working, since hunger, like mentioned before, inhibits many people from working to their fullest potential. More people working undoubtedly means more money going in for the government to use to better their respective nations, money that governments can use to better sanitation, medicine, infrastructure, and technology.
By investing in areas that increase standard of living, third world countries can gradually climb into the ranks of Western nations. One way nations could do this is through education. When hunger is interweaved in the fabric of society, young boys and girl are more likely to drop out of school, and if they do manage to stay out of their own will, often times, their parents will extract them from school for the sake of having another source of income to buy food. This practice suppresses potential growth in nations that only educated people can unlock.
Educated people earn more from the economy, contribute more to the economy, and depend less on welfare for sustenance like many hungry nations are today. By increasing food security, countries would also become more stable and less population dense. Ending world hunger, of course, would satisfy the global cry for food and eradicate diseases like anaemia and malnutrition, however, it would also bring about an abundance of other positive economic results. On the other hand, many argue that people cannot eradicate hunger.
They argue that so as long as there is a growing population, there will have to be people who go hungry, that there is simply not enough food or money in the world to feed everyone. While it is true that the task would be troublesome, ending world hunger is still within possibility. In 1990, 23% of the global population was undernourished, which counted more 1. 1 billion people. In 2016, only 13% of the population, 795 million, lack the necessary resources to be fully nourished. Between 1990 and 2016, the quantity of impoverished citizens decreased a whopping 216 million.
Progress is more than possible. Progress has already been made, but needs one last push, for the remaining 795 million that deserve nourishment. Who is to say that the last 13% is unattainable? An article from The Guardian even reported that providing the food needed by the last 13% would take no more than 1% of the global food supply. If the entire global food supply were to be evenly distributed, there would be enough for each person to get 2,700 calories, even more than the minimum 2,100 calorie requirement for healthy living.
The crisis is not a matter of food shortage, but rather food security, finding a way for the food to make it into the right hands. The crisis is also not matter of whether or not humanitarian nations have the funds. According to the World Health Organization, it would take $3. 6 billion dollars to feed all of the undernourished children in developing countries. Though it may seem like a large quantity, consider the fact that Europe spends three times that amount for ice cream annually, and that in 2014, Americans spent $70. 4 billion on lottery tickets.
Ending world hunger is a matter of choice, a choice that can define the nation that says yes. It is a choice that can permanently alter the image of said nation around the world. It is a choice that would blossom legacies of ushering the world into an age without hunger. All things considered, human endeavor, in the area of increasing food security, is paramount in that it will stop unnecessary diseases from running rampant, thus decreasing death rates in adults and children, and will unlock new economic opportunities for economies that were formerly hungry and stagnant.
All things said, ending this cruel phenomena is up to the people watching, people like you and me. However, we have been watching long enough to see that too many people are dying from a problem that has a foreseeable solution. It is not our job to act as spectators to the world’s problems, but rather as advocates for its many victims, for when we do, we will not only change their world, but ours as well.