To begin with, I’d like to point out that hunger kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Additionally, the vast majority of hungry people (827 million) live in developing countries, where 14.3 percent of the population is undernourished (Hunger Statistics). On that note, many people like to associate population growth as a cause that will lead to the scarcity of food, which is not entirely true. There are more than enough global food resources, and yet world hunger is extensive. In fact, most hungry people live in countries that have excess in food. Therefore, increasing food production will not solve world hunger. Food is readily available to those who can afford it, which is why solving the poverty problem is part of the answer to the world hunger problem (Shah, Anup). Accordingly, we have to ask ourselves what is the main cause of poverty around the world? As Anup Shah points out, poverty around the world is a consequence, mainly due to international trade and economic policies.
One of the political issues around this is the Genetic Modification of food (GM), which many people are unaware of. The science behind genetically modified food is always improving; however, the concern many people have is that a few large profit-hungry corporations are controlling the research, and promotion for GM. Therefore, there’s reason to suspect that they don’t always have our best interest at heart. Additionally, GM food is an expensive technology, making it hard for farmers around the world to have access to. Furthermore, patented laws have crippled the poor because biotech companies have patented indigenousness knowledge without consent. The patents are then used to create monopolies, which drive the price...
... middle of paper ...
...mme Fighting Hunger Worldwide. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
Shah, Anup. "Population and Feeding the World." - Global Issues. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
J.W. Smith, The World's Wasted Wealth: the political economy of waste, (New World's Press, 1989), pp. 44, 45.
Jeppesen, Helle. "Population Growth Challenges Poor Nations | Globalization | DW.DE | 10.08.2013." DW.DE. N.p., 08 Oct. 2013. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.
Sadik, Dr Nafis. "Population Growth and the Food Crisis." Population Growth and the Food Crisis. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
"How Does Judaism View Food Aid? A Text Study." N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
Schwartz, Richard, Ph.D. "The Jewish Response to Hunger." The Jewish Response to Hunger. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
Simmons, Shraga, Rabbi. "Ask the Rabbi - Jewish Views on Poverty." Ask the Rabbi - Jewish Views on Poverty. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
Sheeran, Josette. “Preventing hunger: sustainability not aid.” Nature 479.7374 (2011): 469+. Academic OneFile. Web. 6 Feb. 2014.
Rosenbaum, D. & Neuberger, Z. (2005, August 17). Food and nutrition programs: Reducing hunger and bolstering nutrition. Retrieved from http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=510
There are three main factors that fuel rapid population growth in the world. Firstly, the increased production and distribution of food has now enabled more people to live longer lives. Initially, starvation caused high death rates, therefore inhibiting population growth. In our modern society, there is an abundance of food to feed the population. Improved distribution channels have enabled food to reach into dry places, thereby eliminating the risk of starvation. Secondly, there is an overall improvement of public health care. Poor sanitation and lack of clean water were the main causes of deadly diseases like malaria. These diseases often wiped
The Neo-Malthusian dilemma is the worry that our food stocks will not match the population growth leading to famine and disease. This is a growing concern since our population is quickly increasing, we are not bringing new land under cultivation, and we are damaging the environment that is producing our food and sustaining our people. Between 1999 and 2011, the world population increased by one billion, Middleton(2013) noted that it took until 1804 for the world to reach its first billion. The population growth we have exhibited is exponential, and it is only scheduled to peak some time between 2050 and 21003 . Many countries are still expected to go through major population growth. We constantly hear about China and India but Africa is expected to overtake them both by 2050 and make up 23% of the global population4.These large populaces depend on land to grow their food. Urbanization is transforming some farmland into urban areas, like in China for example5 .This land is no longer being used for farming. Until the 1950s, we were able to develop new land for cultivation and thus produce more food, but since then we’ve had no new land to
There are many problems confronting our global food system. One of them is that the food is not distributed fairly or evenly in the world. According “The Last Bite Is The World’s Food System Collapsing?” by Bee Wilson, “we are producing more food—more grain, more meat, more fruits and vegetables—than ever before, more cheaply than ever before” (Wilson, 2008). Here we are, producing more and more affordable food. However, the World Bank recently announced that thirty-three countries are still famine and hungers as the food price are climbing. Wilson stated, “despite the current food crisis, last year’s worldwide grain harvest was colossal, five per cent above the previous year’s” (Wilson, 2008). This statement support that the food is not distributed evenly. The food production actually increased but people are still in hunger and malnutrition. If the food were evenly distributed, this famine problem would’ve been not a problem. Wilson added, “the food economy has created a system in w...
“For each day, farmers grow 2,800 calories per person on the planet,” but then why do we still have such huge amounts of people who have too little to eat. It is important to know what is hunger and undernourishment. Undernourishment always describe as a long-term hunger and hunger could be a physical condition marked by stomach pangs and general fatigue (Stone,2014). The most important reason that people have too little to eat, is in some regions, they don’t have the access to deliver the food and the place has been isolated for a long time, and the development agencies find it hard to get the food in and data out (Stone,2014). In other words, the food often doesn’t get to the people who really need it. As we can see in fig.1 and fig.2, fortunately, all the data represents that the overall number of undernourished people around the world had gone down. So that means more and more people will get a help and change their life
Social Sciences: “What role does poverty play in world hunger issues, and how does it affect the daily lives of those living without food”?
In many regions of the world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, high levels of hunger are still prevalent. There has actually been an increase in hunger statistics in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade while the developed world has collectively experienced a decrease. Many factors are attributed to the lack of progress on this socio-political issue. The most common are the lack of good soil to produce food, natural disasters, and the surge in food prices. There have been several initiatives taken to reduce hunger but root of the problem has to be identified first before any legitimate change can occur.
Some people argue, that world hunger is due to overpopulation instead of poverty. They argue, that when rich nations aid third world countries, it just encourages the poor people to reproduce faster which leads to them needing more food. Marx argues that “helping the poor will drag the well feed down to their subsistence level” (Are There Too Many People). So if rich nations would stop helping people living in third world countries they would have less mouths to feed and more money to buy food. Third world nations need to learn how to live within their limits. Then there would not be such a problem with not enough food being produced or them not being able to afford food.
Howmany.org. "Overpopulation:." Effects of Overpopulation on the Environment and Society. Institute for Population Studies, 2009. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
In the past ten years the world population exceeded six billion people with most of the growth occurring in the poorest, least developed countries in the world. The rapidly increasing population and the quickly declining amount of land are relative and the rate at which hunger is increasing rises with each passing year. We cannot afford to continue to expand our world population at such an alarming rate, for already we are suffering the consequences. Hunger has been a problem for our world for thousands of years. But now that we have the technology and knowledge to stamp it out, time is running short.
Empirics have shown that famines could thrive even without a general decline in food availability. Even in other cases, starvation has several other variables apart from food availability. FAD approach, which is a food centric view, provides very less idea about the causal mechanism of starvation. It is a gross concept which cannot be applied to the population as a whole. It is not possible for the food supply to fall behind population growth for the world as a whole. Entitlement Approach concentrates on the ability of different sections of the population to have a command over food with the entitlement relations of that society. The latter approach requires use of categories based on certain discriminations. ‘Poor’ as a category is not suitable for causal analysis or evaluative exercises as it can distort public policy. A market economy is characterized by a price for every good or service and every player owns some goods or services. People will starve when their entitlement is not sufficient to buy the food for survival. The food available to them makes a connection with their income distribution and exchange process. The supply of food is not considered to be irrelevant. A decrease in the supply of food will increase its price which decreases the ability to buy food by using their entitlement and may drive to starvation if on the margins of hunger. The
There is a serious development that concerns not only hungry people but all of us. Food is becoming too expensive and food riots are spreading. There were tortilla riots in Mexico when the praise of grain became unaffordable which can happen again. Most countries have been able to feed their own but there is a fear that the millions of the unfed will come across borders to eat. If this happens those with food will battle to keep it from the hungry. Supermarkets will be forced to place armed guards in front of their doors and refrigerators will be padlocked. There are food riots going on at the present time in Haiti where the government was overthrown. Nobody can predict tomorrows costs of grain or rice. Many say it will double in price in the coming months.
Danielle Knight stated that “The true source of world hunger is not scarcity but policy; not inevitability but politics, the real culprits are economies that fail to offer everyone opportunities, and societies that place economic efficiency over compassion.” The author is trying to say that, basically, world hunger is mainly caused by us humans. The world is providing more than enough food for each and every one of us on earth according to the report - 'World Hunger: Twelve Myths'. The problem is that there are so many people living in the third world countries who do not have the money to pay for readily available food. Even if their country has excess food, they still go hungry because of poverty. Since people are mistaken by “scarcity is the real cause of this problem”, governments and institutions are starting to solve food shortage problems by increasing food production, while there really is an excess of food in some countries. Although the green revolution was a big success globally, hunger still exists in some countries. The author stated, “Large farms, free-markets, free trade, and more aid from industrialized countries, have all been falsely touted as the ‘cure’ to end hunger”. All of those are used to promote exports and food production, it doesn’t increase the poor’s ability to buy food he says. What the government really should do is to balance out the economy, and let more people earn more money to buy more foods.
Hunger and poverty have been a major problem in the world, which has being leading most people to death than cancer, Ebola, and malaria do. More than thousands of people die from hunger and poverty, and most of the people who suffer most are children below the age of ten. Hunger and poverty have contributed to the world food crisis that has an impact on the economy, the environment, and political issues. People living with hunger and poverty are more than those living a successful life in both developed and developing the world. Hunger makes victims live underweight, causing numerous of sickness to their health. Lack of