Have you wondered how much food is being thrown away every year? Or how throwing food away affects so many people in the world? Well, “each year 108 billion pounds of food is wasted every year in the United States.” That is a crazy big number. When that much food is being wasted there are so many people out there not just in the United States but everywhere in the world are going hungry. “ When we waste food, we also waste all the energy and water it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and package it. And it goes to the landfill and rots, it produces methane - a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide,” says WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) an organization that works with wilderness and human impact on the environment.
One of the main causes of world hunger is poverty. Poverty is just not having enough money to spend on groceries and such to fill your body with nutritious foods. In places like Africa for example there are not many job opportunities for people in villages so they often have to deal with poverty and not having that income to pay for things. The countries with the highest poverty rates are South Sudan (82.30%), Equatorial Guinea (76.80%), Madagascar (70.70%), Guinea - Bissau (69.30%), Eritrea (69.00%), Sao Tome and Principe (66.70%), Burundi (64.90%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (63.90%), Central African Republic (62.00%), and Guatemala (59.30%).
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World hunger is rising every day. Every day more and more food is being thrown away. “Globally, about 8.9% of the world’s population - 690 million - go to bed on an empty stomach each night,” says Kathryn Reid 2020. In the past couple of years with Covid 19 going around, I have learned a lot about nutrients and how important it is. So I know that these children and adults are not getting what their bodies need. It is not gonna help them any. Whether it's because of low income or something else these people need to be getting their nutrients.
Children are most affected by not getting the food they need. Children need food to grow and become big and when they are not getting what they need they could honestly not live for very long. I recently read a post from a friend on social media that they walked down the baby formula and food aisle and there was nothing. When things like this are children are not going to be successful health-wise. With the past couple of years and how Covid has affected everyone a lot of people lost their jobs. So there is no one to package and ship these foods like baby formula and food to these stores for parents to buy them. Even if the baby is still in the womb and the mother is not getting the nutrition for herself the baby has a chance of not developing before entering the world.
Right now there is a war going on in the world. With something like a war those people where the wars are happening people won't be able to get the food they need because you really can't go outside. “Ukraine and Russia combined export 30% of the world’s wheat, in addition to other food supplies. Now, because of the ongoing war, the price of food worldwide is skyrocketing and 38 countries are facing acute food insecurity, meaning they are just one step from famine,” says NPR (National Public Radio).
In Africa, Niger which has a population of 24 million people is struggling to go into April which is Ramadan this year. The malnutrition rate in Niger is about 10% of kids under the age of five. “Niger also hosts over 800,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), refugees or other uprooted people, and these populations are also food insecure,” says WHES in Hunger Notes
When the pandemic hit in 2020 people were frantically shopping to get whatever they could to stock up their houses with what they needed so they did not have to leave their homes. The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition states that “In March 2020, world food prices surged at the fastest pace ever, jumping nearly 13% to a new record high. Low-income countries that are already struggling to recover from Covid 19 and rely on reasonably priced wheat, vegetable oils, and other food staples will be hit hardest by skyrocketing prices.”
Earlier I stated that poverty was the number one cause of hunger. Well here are a few more reasons why food shortage, war and conflict, climate change, poor nutrition, poor public policy, economy, food waste, gender inequality, and forced migration are the top reasons why hunger is so big in the world.
In the world, there are so many farmers. Farming and agriculture are so important in helping fight hunger but there are a few things that might be putting a hold on farming. If the farmers around the world don't adapt to climate change then they won’t have crops to harvest to be processed and sold. According to EWG (Environmental Working Group) “The number of people living in poverty could increase by between 35 million and 122 million by 2030. The FAO said that's because the population will grow fastest in developing countries that are the most vulnerable to more frequent droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events caused by climate change.”
We all wish we could just snap our fingers and world hunger would be gone but that's not the case. Here are some possible ways world hunger could come to an end: sustainable food, access to credit, food donations, transitioning, urban farming, access to education, social change, and government intervention. Those are just a few examples of how we as a world could help try and end world hunger. If we don't take a step in helping solve world hunger more and more children could die and not just children but adults and the elderly as well.
In conclusion, world hunger can be ended with just some changes that we as a world have to help with. More and more food is being wasted and more people are dying because of world hunger. There is so much we could do and even donating money to organizations like Action Against Hunger and The Hunger Project would be so amazing. As a world, we should try not to throw away as much food and start having gardens of our own that we can pick from when things are needed. Given these points, I encourage you and others to try and do something that will help with ending world hunger.
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