World Hunger Essays - Health, Personal Life, Food And Drink, Hunger

World Hunger Every day an estimated 24,000 people die from hunger or hunger related causes. Three-fourths of these deaths are children under the age of five. One may wonder how this can be living in a country were it seems so much food is wasted everyday. Food restaurants and grocery stores throw away food every night before closing. Many Americans waste food every day within their own homes. With so much "left over" food in American how is it that an estimated 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition?1 Well, first we must define the word hunger. Hunger, in this case, is not just the rumbling in ones stomach that most of us feel if we have not eaten for a few hours. For this purpose, hunger is defined as "a condition resulting from chronic under-consumption of food and/or nutritious food products. It may be precipitated by an inability to obtain sufficient quantities of food to eat or a failure to consume adequate quantities of nutritious food products, regardless of the ability to obtain sufficient food supplies."2 The problem of world hunger is not that there is not enough food produced in the world. "World production of grain alone is over 1.5 billion tons, enough to supply the entire world population with two pounds a day."3 This grain combined the current production of other foods such as meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts is enough to provide each adult and child on earth 3000 calories a day which is what the average American consumes.4 Americans are not the only ones who waste food. People all over the world are doing the very same thing. And the though it seems that America has too much food, we Americans have hungry people living right here in our own country. The world hunger problem lies within the changing environmental conditions, population, and most of all, poverty. This paper will discuss the causes, effects and possible solutions of world hunger. There are three major causes of world hunger, changing environment conditions, population, and poverty. The environment, of course, is the major element in the production of food in most countries across the globe. The environment in which one lives decides what types of food can be produced and how much of that food can be produced. The weather or climate in any particular environment can change and affect what people eat and how much of it they are able to eat. One change in the environment that adversely affects agriculture is soil erosion. "Some one-third of the world's cropland is loosing topsoil at a rate that undermines its future productivity."5 Topsoil is a major factor in growing most crops. It is the richest part of the soil and contains minerals and nutrients that most plants need for survival. Too much soil erosion begins a chain reaction leaving the land susceptible to drought. And as we all know, very little food can be grown on dry land. A drought not only affects plants, but as a result of lack of plants and water and in many cases extreme heat cattle are starved or die from thirst. This loss of organic matter in the land results in runoff after rainfall and increased runoff and rainfall allows for flooding. A flood, like the drought though they are opposite, wipes away crops or kills them because of the overabundance of water. People can attempt to produce food by planting and caring for their land and animals, but Mother Nature has the ultimate say and humans are unable to predict what she will do next. The next two causes of hunger we will discuss together because they coincide, population and the poor. Population is an issue not because there are too many mouths to feed, as was stated earlier, but because the hungry people of the world are the majority who have large families and continue to increase them, thus creating hungry children. "Poor people have large families for many reasons...Reasons of security for their old age. Reasons about additional help on the land. Reasons concerning the cultural preference for sons. Reasons related to the laws of inheritance. Reasons dictated by traditional religious behavior. And reasons of personal pride"6 These are all reasons why poor people all over the country continue to have large families generation after generation despite their economic condition. The majority of the hungry live and work in rural areas. Why are poor people affected so much by hunger? The answer would be seemingly simple, that they are just unable to afford