At this moment, more than a billion people experience the gnawing pain of perpetual hunger.
Each year 25 million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases.
About 70,000 people die from the effects of hunger each day.
That's about one person every 1.5 seconds.

Half of men, women, and children in southern Africa are suffering from chronic malnutrition.
In Latin America, nearly 1 out of every 8 people goes to bed hungry every night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28% of the people border on starvation.
More than two billion people have lack of essential micronutrients, and hundreds of millions suffer from diseases caused by unsafe or unbalanced food intake.

Globally, children who are poorly nourished suffer up to 160 days of illness each year. They are sick for almost half of their lives.
Malnutrition magnifies the effect of every disease.
An estimated 174 million children, under the age of five, in the developing world are malnourished as indicated by low weight for age. 230 million are stunted. Malnutrition results in poor physical and cognitive development as well as lower resistance to illness.

Hunger, and insecurity about whether a family will be able to obtain enough food to avoid hunger, also has an emotional impact on children and their parents.
Anxiety, negative feelings about self-worth and hostility towards the outside world can result from chronic hunger and food insecurity. Children suffer from the thought that they won’t have anything to eat after 15 hours of hard work in the cacao farms.

1 in 4 children worldwide will be malnourished or underweight for his age in the year 2020, because of the growing food gap in developing countries.
The UN estimation for the world human population by the year 2020 is 9 billion!!!
That means 1.5 billion hungry people.
1 in 4 children worldwide will be malnourished or underweight in the year 2020.
What are you waiting for? Where do you drew the line? 1 in 3?
When 1 out of every 2 children will be hungry, will it be enough?
One children is more than enough.

Cretins

Worldwide, there are 5.7 million people who were born cretins because their mothers were iodine-deficient during pregnancy.
Iodine deficiency disorder (IDD) jeopardize children’s mental health and often their life. Serious iodine deficiency during pregnancy may result in stillbirths, abortions, and congenital abnormalities such as cretinism - a grave, irreversible form of mental retardation that affects people living in iodine-deficient areas of Africa and Asia.
IDD also causes mental impairment that lowers intellectual ability at home, at school, and at work. IDD affects more than 740 million people, 13% of the world’s population. 50 million people have some degree of mental impairment caused by IDD.

Anemia

Two billion people—over 30% of the world’s population—are anemic, mainly due to iron deficiency, and, in developing countries, it is frequently exacerbated by malaria and worm infections. As a result of anemia premature birth, low birth weight, infections, impaired physical and cognitive developments and elevated risk of death are very common among children. For pregnant women, anemia contributes to 20% of all maternal deaths.

Vitamin A deficiency

Over 250 million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin A deficiency. In developing countries, vitamin A deficiency permanently blinds about 250,000 children a year. It also increases the severity of childhood illnesses, contributing to 20%-30% of the deaths of children under-five.

THE HUMAN RACE IS FAILING IN IT’S MOST SIMPLE AND ELEMENTARY TASK, FEEDING ITSELF.
Theoretically, every country in the world has the potential of growing sufficient food on a sustainable basis. The minimum requirement for caloric intake per person per day is 2,350 calories. Worldwide, there are 2,800 calories available per person per day.
54 countries fall below that requirement, they do not produce enough food to feed their populations, nor can they afford to import the necessary commodities to make up the gap. Most of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

It takes 1.4 acres to feed one person on a typical western meat-based diet: by contrast it takes only 0.2 acres to feed someone on a vegan diet.

In most countries with widespread hunger, a few large landowners control nearly all agricultural production with horrible results.
Land is used for "cash crops" such as cotton or coffee instead of food.
To the owners, land becomes an "investment" not a source of food for the people who live on it. Humans starve each other to death for money.

Hunger is an effect of poverty and poverty is a political issue. While manifesting itself as an economic issue, conditions causing poverty are political.

To put it bluntly, those with most of the money control most of the resources, whilst those with little or no money go hungry. This inevitably leads to a situation whereby some sections of humanity have too much and other sections too little or nothing at all.
Globally the richest 20% of humanity controls around 85% of all wealth, whilst the poorest 20% control only 1.5%.

Poverty is the main cause of hunger. Half of the people in the world live on less than $2 per day.
1.2 billion Poor people in developing countries live on $1 a day or less. Of them, one billion suffer from chronic hunger.

One person out of 5 in developing countries is undernourished; one person out of 5 in major industrialized countries is overweight or obese.
Each child born in the industrialized world will consume 20 to 40 times as much as a child in the developing world in his or her lifetime.
Even though the population rate increase in poor countries is much larger than the population increase in the rich world, the rich puts 8 times as much pressure on world resources.

World hunger exists because:

• Colonialism, and later subtle monopoly capitalism, dispossessed hundreds of millions of people from the land; the current owners are the new plantation managers producing for the mother countries.
• The low-paid undeveloped countries sell to the highly paid developed countries because there is no local market (because the low-paid people do not have enough to pay).
• The current Third World land owners, producing for the First World, are appendages to the industrialized world, stripping all natural wealth from the land to produce food, lumber, and other products for wealthy nations.

To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for their family to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy. Food is a commodity.
Many of the best agricultural lands in the world are used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane and cocoa, which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a big market.
The problem, of course, is that people who don't have enough money to buy food simply don't count in the food equation.

In other words, if you don't have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.
Put it in another way, you would not expect the Gap company to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less, likewise, you would not expect ADM ("supermarket to the world") to produce food for them.
What this means is that ending hunger requires ending poverty, or at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, and hence create a market demand for food.

Hunger is also a cause of poverty. By leading to such effects as poor health, low levels of energy, and even mental impairment, hunger can lead to even greater poverty.

Poor people in the Third World market pay food prices that are determined by what people in rich countries are willing to pay. This is a direct cause of hunger in many poor countries. In addition, people in rich countries are creating a suction force in the world food market, with their own consumption, diverting food from meeting the needs of the very people who have grown it.

Increasingly, countries like India are polluting their air, earth and water to grow products for the western market instead of growing food to feed themselves.
Prime agricultural lands are being poisoned to meet the needs of the western consumers, however, the money the consumers spend does not reach the majority of the poor workers in the Third World.
Everyone loses. Billions of non-human animals are systematically driven of their homes. Deprived of any land, food and water, they are actually being murdered by the farmers. The farmers, forced by western corporations and governments to raise cash crops (tea, sugar, cocoa, cotton etc) instead of food, hence the starving humans are actually murdered by apathetic consumers for a cup of coffee or a chocolate snack.
Finally, the westerns suffer from variety of obese diseases.
Murdered by their own gluttony.

As said before, globally, humans meet the minimum requirement for caloric intake per person per day, therefore obesity is not a cause for hunger.
In fact obese people are victims too. They are constantly manipulated to consume food against their long term interests. Food Companies produce attractive products in attractive packages with an attractive smell which in the best case, have no nutritional contribution to the consumers, and most probably will hurt them in the long term.

Obesity’s health consequences range from increased risk of premature death to serious chronic conditions that reduce the overall quality of life. The related health problems Includes: Heart diseases, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, stroke, and certain forms of cancer, indigestion, gallstones, snoring and sleep apnoea, stress, anxiety, and depression.

Obesity is a world pandemic, with an estimated 300 million obese people in the world.
Between 10% to 20% of the people in europe are obese.
By 2010 it is expected that one out of every 3 humans In the U.S will be Obese.
The dietary health care expenditure is about 10% of U.S general health budget.

Fast food chains spend more than 3 billion dollars a year on advertising, mostly aimed at children. Since the 1960s when children were singled out as a lucrative market, an advertising goal has been to reach children as early as possible, to create life-long consumers.
Restaurants offer incentives such as playgrounds, contests, clubs, games, free toys and other merchandise related to movies, TV shows and even sports leagues. Most food advertising on children's TV shows is for fast foods, soft drinks, candy and pre-sweetened cereals, while commercials for healthy food make up only 5% of those shown.
The overall message from this advertising is clear – eat a lot of food, snack between meals, lobby parents to buy certain products (what the industry calls “pester power”), The irony of the present system is that millions of consumers in the developed world countries are dying from diseases of affluence like heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and cancer, while the poor in the third world are dying from diseases of poverty, as hunger, brought on by the denial of access to land to grow food for their families.

Worldwide, there are about 35 million refugees and displaced people – largely as a result of wars, political turbulence, civil conflict and social unrest. In such emergencies, malnutrition runs rampant, dramatically increasing the risk of disease and death.

Civil strife and instability at regional and local levels will further restrict the poor’s access to food. In areas of conflict, rural populations are frequently forced to flee for their safety, leaving crops untended, the crops are burned and productive assets are stolen. Conflicts disrupt traditional agricultural practices, and exacerbate the effects of climatic fluctuations.

Population density, hunger, poverty and natural resource degradation are contributing to the inception or maintenance of conflicts in poor countries where food insecurity and hunger are rampant.

The impossibility of delivering aid to victims, because the roads are blocked by people exploiting famine situations for all kind of gains, or because climatic disasters block the routes to their homes, is a significant cause of famine.

Humans are so cynical and cruel, they artificially create famines.
Civilian populations are compulsorily moved into towns where it is impossible to gather food from the fields and bring in their harvest, so they starve to death.
Conquers call in humanitarian aid, which can then be hijacked by armed forces.
They acquire a political legitimacy, by prioritizing international recognition, by allowing access of the humanitarian aid to the victims.
In this world the preferred weapon in modern conflicts is Famine.

Somalia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Angola, South Sudan, Great Lakes regions - the famines in all these countries in the last decade have been the result of violent conflicts, with thousands of refugees or displaced people who are always the first victims of hunger.

But, important and tangible as it is, conflict is not nearly as significant as poverty as a cause of hunger. Famine and wars cause about 10% of hunger deaths, although these tend to be the ones you hear about most often. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition. Families facing extreme poverty are simply unable to get enough food.

Famine is a state of acute hunger, with the total lack of food supplies for entire populations, which will inevitably result in death if nothing is done. Famine affects people who find themselves where "natural" disasters occurred or if they are involved in conflicts where hunger is increasingly being used as a political weapon.

Disasters can have severe economic impacts which are difficult to calculate. The Western Indian Ocean islands typically experience ten cyclones a year, between November and May, which bring strong winds and heavy rainfall. This causes destruction of infrastructure, particularly in low-lying areas and where settlements have encroached into flood-prone areas. Huge costs are generated due to the destruction of income-years of activities, including tourism revenues, and rehabilitation and replacement of damaged infrastructure and crops.
Africa’s people and economies are heavily dependent on rain fed agriculture, and are therefore vulnerable to rainfall fluctuations. It is usually the poor who suffer most from flood or drought, both, induce crop failure because they often cultivate in areas that are climatically marginal for crop production, and the people cannot accumulate reserves for times of hardship.
Both droughts and floods can result in malnutrition and famine.

Despite the fact that in the last 50 years, almost 500 million people worldwide have died of hunger, AIDS and poor sanitation, which is 4 times more than the number of people killed in all the wars fought in the 20th century, the priorities are still absolutely absurd.
The relation toward problems like terror (which in comparison to those vast problems is quite minor) is destructively not proportional.