Salt of the Earth: Stat house

Stat house
February 2001

Food agency maps out world hunger
An estimated 830 million people throughout the world currently suffer from hunger triggered by armed conflict, natural disasters and poverty, the United Nation's World Food Programme reported in January.

Most of those undernourished people live in hunger "hot spots" across the globe and may see a difficult year ahead, the WFP said.

"We've seen an alarming trend where the poorest nations are hit simultaneously by both natural and man-made emergencies," Catherine Bertini, head of the WFP, explained at a January press conference. "Unfortunately, we see a potential for that to continue or even increase in 2001."

At the meeting the WFP released a map detailing the worst concentrations of hunger in the world and statistics demonstrating the extent of the crisis. According to the report:

Most of the 830 million who go hungry are women and children. Of those children, more than 12,000 die from malnutrition and related illnesses each day. That's one child every seven seconds.
Conditions are most critical in Africa, where 180 million people in the Sub-Saharan region, or a third of the area's population, are undernourished. The WFP points to government debt burdens, inadequate funding for health and education, poor agricultural production and the AIDS pandemic as contributors to the situation. The worst hit nations include Sudan and Sierra Leone, where civil wars continue, and Guinea, a country the WFP believes could erupt into war if armed incursions and rebel attacks persist along its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Nutritional deficiencies afflict the largest number of people in Asia and the Pacific region: 525 million, or 17 percent of the total population. In Afghanistan civil war and the worst drought in decades could push nearly 4 million to starvation. Typhoons, drought, and infrastructure and economic problems will lead North Korea into its seventh straight year of food shortages. The WFP reports it currently feeds a third of the 23 million North Koreans.
Latin America and the Caribbean will face a tough year as well. Eleven percent of the region's population—53 million people—do not get enough to eat. Haiti, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Honduras may be hit the hardest.

The WFP based its report on figures gathered by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization for 1995 to 1997, but said the situation has not improved. Since then "the exact numbers may have changed, but the percentages haven't," Public Information Officer Abby Spring said. "We're looking at trends."

The WFP considered this information when allocating aid efforts for the year. It designated more than two-thirds of its 2001 projected emergency aid needs to the Horn of Africa.

"We feed roughly 89 million people a year in 80 countries," Spring said, "but we're just putting Band-Aids out all over the world."

Bertini predicted humanitarian organizations will need more support this year. "The international community needs to confront these problems with us now, in places like Sudan, Guinea, and Afghanistan," she insisted. "Both more money and greater political resolve must be committed before these crises grow worse. Hunger is a global problem and it needs global responses."

The food agency will require more than $1.5 billion to meet its goals this year.

According to the WFP, hunger occurs when a person does not get enough food to support an active lifestyle. The undernourished consume 1,800 or fewer calories a day, instead of the recommended 2,100.

While the WFP does not accept small contributions of food, Spring urged individuals to get involved by writing politicians, holding fundraisers for emergencies or visiting The Hunger Site.—Anne Graber

More info:
America's Second Harvest
Bread for the World
Brown University's HungerWeb
Catholic Relief Services
Food First
Food Research and Action Center
PovertyNet
World Hunger Education Service
World Hunger Year

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