If people are willing to work, why are they still at risk of going hungry?
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. 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.
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.
How does hunger affect children?
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.
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."
What does the global picture look like?
852 million people, mainly in developing countries, are still chronically or acutely undernourished. Although progress against hunger has been made in China and East Asia, the majority of those who are malnourished live in China (114 million) and India (221 million). But Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where hunger is increasing, with 204 million hungry. |
