Population…A Problem That Most of the World Simply Disregards
There are over Six Billion people inhabiting the planet earth today and that number is growing. “In the six seconds it takes you to read this sentence, eighteen more people will be added” (Ehrlich 9). The total population of the World, projected on October 23, 2001 at 6:28:09 pm GMT was 6,181,600,089 people (U.S. Bureau of the Census). Each hour there are 11,000 more mouths to feed; each year more than 95 million. Nevertheless, the world has hundreds of billions fewer tons of topsoil and hundreds of trillions fewer gallons of groundwater with which to grow food crops than it had in 1968.
Millions of people every year are dying because they are not getting enough food. You see the advertisements, and television programs showing the starving children in Africa and other developing nations: their pleading eyes with helplessness. National Geographic shows the images of tropical forests on fire, beaches strewn with garbage and sewage, and refugee camps filled with hungry people unable to produce enough food because there aren’t enough resources to support the world’s growing number of people.
These problem do not only exist in far away countries…drive in any large city, you will be overwhelmed with the number of drivers filling the freeways, grid locked any time of day. Visit downtown and see the hundreds of homeless people on street corners, and lined up around the block in front of the shelters for a warm meal. Our news is filled with the nation’s crime, violence, and drug abuse. Global warming is old news, but it is killing us, our ocean level is rising, and our crops are going dry. We are cautioned about the AIDS epidemic because it is everywhere,...
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...t needs to understand the problem at hand, and recognize its far-reaching consequences.
Works Cited
Bouvier, Leon. “The Census Bureau’s 1989 Projections of Future U.S. Population:
Which Scenario Is Reasonable?” CIS Backgrounder. October 1989: 59-65.
Breland, H. “Family Configuration and Intellectual Development.” Journal of individual
Psychology. vol. 31, pp.86-96, 1977.
Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. The Population Explosion. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1990.
Menk, Thomas. “Eco-Refugees Warning.” New Scientist, 10 June 1999: 33-35.
Running, Stephen F. “What If the Supreme Court Changed Its Mind?” Stanford Lawyer.
Fall 1988: 15-29.
Swerdlow, Joel L. “Changing America.” National Geographic. Sept. 2001: 42-61.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. World POP Clock Projection. 23 October 2001
<http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclockw>.
Do you know what it feels like to be truly hungry? Have you experienced the deep-seeded fear that arises from not knowing where your next meal is coming from? Luckily, I am not forced to answer “yes” to either of those distressing questions and neither does roughly 79% of the world’s population. However, according to certain statistics, “11.3% of the world’s population” is personally familiar with chronic hunger. To put that figure into perspective, 11.3% of the world’s population boils down to “roughly 805 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis.” (dosomething.org) Eight hundred five million people suffer needlessly says the author of the article because “the world produces enough food to feed all 7 billion people…” (dosomething.org) How is it possible then, that we as people, can possess the resources to feed those millions of hungry people but choose to stand idly by and refuse to help? Sadly, by doing nothing, mankind makes a conscious decision to allow millions of human beings to suffer from malnourishment.
Imagine coming home as a single parent to your two small children. Their eyes are dull, their ribs are highly noticeable under their old shirts and they ask, “Did you bring us home anything to eat?” You can almost feel your heart being ripped apart as their little faces shine with hope, thinking maybe you finally brought some food home. Unfortunately, you have nothing to give them. Across the globe, people are living in situations much like I mentioned. They have leaky roofs, old clothes and little to no food. Children come home and search their cupboards only to find them bare. Then there are the kids who come home to find their cupboards chock full of unhealthy foods such as chips, sweets and processed goods. Some of these impoverished places are known as food deserts. Together, we can feed the hungry and give them the nourishment they need.
It's like a cloud that floats heavily over our heads, casting dark shadows in our world, but is still ignored. Global hunger, a problem that's everywhere yet many people refuse to acknowledge it, maybe because it's never been directly an issue to them, or maybe it's because being born into wealth has made some lack compassion. I'm not judging, it's hard to feel empathetic to something you don't see every day, something that quietly sits underneath our noses. You can't feel understanding for something you don't have knowledge of. However, global hunger is a real problem, one that shouldn’t be ignored with such ease but recognized and helped.
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
As the world population grows so does the amount of people that live without the proper amount of nutrition and food. Hunger in America can be hard to recognize and many people do not realize that hunger and malnutrition is a problem that many Americans face every day. America is the land of plenty and one of the most powerful and wealthy countries in the world, however is well known that is subject to problem such as starvation, considered as “third-world problem”. For decades, Americans have gone above and beyond to aid other countries that were faced with problems such as malnutrition and hunger. Sadly, the US has failed to aid them and millions are currently suffering from hunger. In addition, with how the economy is now, the effects of hunger are getting worse every day. Many Americans are relying and most of them depend on food stamps and private organizations to help with this crisis. The documentary, “A Place at the Table” by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush present some issues and real life story to explain what is really happening and how hunger and obesity are not problems on opposite ends of a spectrum, but are in fact intricately linked. Poor nutrition, health problem and poverty are all related.
The world hunger is the deadliest disease in the world today, despite the fact that there is more food on earth, but fewer people cannot have access to this food, or even get the opportunity to grow some due to poverty, or lack of good soil to grow crops. World hunger is caused when natural resources become destroyed by earthquakes, or civil war. Another reason is drought and flooding. World hunger is also an issue in undeveloped countries because of political corruption, poverty, environmental issues, overpopulation, economics, and pestilence. It is sad to see people dying from malnutrition, and starvation every second. While we that have it doesn’t seem to appreciate it but waste it instead of helping those that in need of it. As you can see this a real problem, as debated in my visual
Across the globe in impoverished third world countries an estimated 50,000 children die of starvation every day (Quine 36). We have all seen the images of these children--bloated bellies, fly covered, bulging eyes--in television pleas by various charitable organizations. While these images sicken us, we idly sit by (often flipping the channel to avoid them), refusing to help these less fortunate kids. The problem is made worse by the ever-increasing population. Even the wealthy countries like our own now have a starvation problem (Quine 29). Admittedly, the problem here is less severe, but it still exists. With our current level of technology, the resources at our disposal, and a commitment to help those less fortunate, we can and must end starvation around the world before it gets worse.
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.
Hunger is the most pressing issue we face. One out of every eight people in the world today suffers from chronic undernourishment caused by food scarcity. 19,000 kids die everyday from hunger. The world has more than 1.5 times enough food to feed everyone on this entire planet although with some people making less than two dollars an hour, it is hardly imaginable to be able to. At least the number of people who die everyday of famine is going down every year because more and more people care. We want to keep this number going down not only by the year, but also by the day. If we want this to happen, we have to take action. Now.
Food insecurity defined, is ‘the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food’ (Oxforddictionaries.com, 2014). This in turn leads to hunger, which can have three possible meanings; 1) ‘the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite, also the exhausted condition caused by want of food’, 2) ‘the want or scarcity of food in a country’, and 3) ‘a strong desire or craving’ (Worldhunger.org, 2014). Food insecurity also leads to malnutrition, with 870 million people in the world or one in eight, suffering from chronic undernourishment (Fao.org, 2014). From this alarmingly high figure, 852 million of these people live in developing countries, making it evident that majority of strategies used to solve this problem should be directed at them (Fao.org, 2014). The world produces enough food to feed everyone, with an estimated amount of 2,720 Kcal per person a day (Worldhunger.org, 2014). The only problem is distri...
Famine has struck parts of Africa several times during the 20th century, and to this day is still going strong. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the average African consumes 2300 kcal/day, less than the global average of 2700 kcal/day. Recent figures estimate that 316 million Africans, or approximately 35 percent of the continent's total population, is undernourished. Although hunger in Africa is hardly new, it now occurs in a world that has more than enough food to feed all its citizens. Moreover, while Africa's population is growing rapidly, it still has ample fertile land for growing food. Hunger therefore reflects not absolute food scarcity but rather people's lack of access to resources—whether at the individual, house-hold, comunity, or national leve that are needed to produce or purchase adequate food supplies. The reasons people cannot obtain enough food are: several different historical patterns of in equality. These patterns include the in equalities between Africa and its former colonisers or contemporary financiers, and between Africa's rich and poor. It also includes in equality between members of the same households, where food and the resources needed to obtain it (such as land and income) are often unevenly distributed between men and women, old and young. Whatever the reasons for food deprivation, when the result is malnutrition it can do damage, increasing diseases such as malaria, rickets, anemia, and perhaps acquired immune deficiency syndrome aka AIDS Mal-nourished children suffer stunted growth and, often, learning problems. Malnourished adults have less energy to work. Over the long term, inadequate nourishment can cast communities into a cycle o...
Impoverished countries are suffering because of overpopulation. Overpopulation remains the leading driver of hunger, desertification, species depletion and a range of social maladies across the planet (Tal, 2013). If you look at the world most of the countries that are dealing with these problems it is due to overpopulation. Impoverished countries do not have the money or resources to help them overcome this issue (Tal, 2013). Impoverished countries also do not have the medicine or technology to even prevent the most common of illnesses (Tal, 2013). Malnutrition is also affecting...
One of the most complex issues in the world today concerns human population. The number of people living off the earth’s resources and stressing its ecosystem has doubled in just forty years. In 1960 there were 3 billion of us; today there are 6 billion. We have no idea what maximum number of people the earth will support. Therefore, the very first question that comes into people’s mind is that are there enough food for all of us in the future? There is no answer for that. Food shortage has become a serious problem among many countries around the world. There are many different reasons why people are starving all over the world. The lack of economic justice and water shortages are just merely two examples out of them all.
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