Hunger is defined as populations suffering from extreme food insecurity which meant that they go days without eating due to the lack of income, lack of access for food and resources which can lead to malnutrition; undernutrition and obesity. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) noted that there is no food deficit and there is more than enough to sustain the world population with at least 2720 kilocalories per day (Rorabacher, 2010), however, world hunger has been a chronic concern throughout the years. It is projected that 526 million people were starving in Asia, 227 million in Africa, 37 million in Latin America and the Caribbean and 1.4 million in Oceania in 2014 and in 2016, 815 million people of world’s 7.6 billion population or 10.7 per cent suffered from severe undernourishment (FAO, as cited in Hite & Seitz, 2016). If the surplus of food is sufficient for the world population, why is world hunger still a persistent problem? The question is not food production but instead it is intricately related to systems of global economic, political and social power; forms of production and consumption; and societal inequalities focused on race, ethnicity, gender and age.
Poverty is among the leading causes of hunger. Hunger and poverty are interrelated; hunger is not just a cause of but it is also a production of poverty. Both are pulling each other in an implacable circle creating a hunger-poverty trap. The long term effect of hunger on health and education confirms the hunger-poverty cycle as being undernourished and lack nutritions in iron, vitamin A, iodine and zinc caused low IQs and learning disabilities (Dziedzic, 2006). A variety of factors may lead to the hunger-poverty trap including diseases and lack of resources which affect access to markets. Most poor people who live in extreme poverty with an income of $1.90 or less per day surfaces in the least developed countries mainly in densely populated South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and in rural areas within those regions in particular. This is due to the fact that rural poverty is often the greatest in areas most remote from roads, markets, schools and medical services (Das, 2006). World Food Programme (2009) noted that areas, where travel expenses are expensive, tend to have a prevalence of underweight children as compared to areas where the roads are well linked which indicates that there are geographical poverty traps. That does not, however, mean that metropolitan cities do not have hungry poor. Urban populations pose food access problems as they depend on markets and frequently address challenging trade-offs between conflicting income demands such as housing, transportation and healthcare.
References
- United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Zero Hunger
- World Food Programme: Hunger Statistics
- National Center for Biotechnology Information: The Link Between Poverty and Hunger
- The World Bank: Poverty Overview
- National Center for Biotechnology Information: The Impact of Poverty on Food Intake, Energy Balance, and Obesity in Developing Countries
127 our experts are availableright now
