Definitions of hunger from commonly-used references include: A desire or need for food; any appetite, strong desire, or craving. (Dirckx, 2001) The uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also the exhausted condition caused by want of food. (Oxford American Dictionary, 1980) A physiological need for food; the consequence of food deprivation; strong desire for something; feel the need to eat; have a craving, appetite, strong desire for; be hungry; go without food. (WordNet, n. d. ) A sensation resulting from lack of food, characterized by dull or acute pain referred to the epigastrium or lower part of the chest.
Usually accompanied by weakness and an overwhelming desire to eat. Hunger pains coincide with powerful contractions of the stomach. Hunger is distinguished from appetite in that the latter is a pleasant sensation based on previous experience that causes one to seek food for the purpose of tasting and enjoying it; to have a strong desire. (Thomas, 1989) HUNGER: Hunger is not just the need to eat; hunger, as the word is used by food and health experts can be defined as the continuing deprivation in a person of the food needed to support a healthy life. The more technical term is under nutrition.
Over time, hunger slows physical and mental development in children and leaves them more vulnerable to illness and disease. For example, respiratory and diarrhea infections are common in undernourished children, and even diseases of vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness, anemia, caused by iron deficiency and goiter due to iodine deficiency. Undernourished adults lose weight, are progressively weakened, and become apathetic, less creative and imaginative, and more irritable. Although acute hunger or famine receives more attention from the world’s ews media, it should be remembered that the great majority of hunger deaths come not from starvation but from nutrition-related sicknesses and diseases. Hunger, malnutrition and under nutrition are all terms used to describe aspects of this problem. There is an important difference between ‘under nutrition’ and ‘malnutrition’. Under nutrition is quantitative and means that people do not get enough to eat whereas malnutrition is qualitative and means that a person’s diet is lacking the necessary amounts of certain elements that are essential to growth, such as vitamins, salts and proteins.
This implies, of course, that a malnourished person does not necessarily feel hungry. In some areas, under nutrition tends to occur yearly, on a seasonal basis, in the period just before harvest. This is the time when the food stocks of a family or farm community are exhausted and the new harvest is not yet in. There is a famine when under nutrition is extreme, causing death by starvation. WORLD HUNGER: World hunger refers to the multitudes of people presently facing the risk of an insufficient (quantity) or inadequate (quality) food supply, something known as food insecurity.
This problem has led to detriments from the insidious, such as stunted growth and a greater risk of contracting disease, to the obvious, namely starvation and death. NUMBER 1 RISK TO HEALTH: In the final quarter of the 20th century, humanity was winning the war on its oldest enemy. From 1970-1997, the number of hungry people dropped from 959 million to 791 million — mainly the result of dramatic progress in reducing the number of undernourished in China and India. In the second half of the 1990s, however, the number of chronically hungry in developing countries started to increase at a rate of almost four million per year.
By 2001-2003, the total number of undernourished people worldwide had risen to 854 million and the latest figure is 925 million. Today, almost one person in six does not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life, making hunger and malnutrition the number one risk to health worldwide — greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. WHO ARE THE HUNGRY? Most of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. According to the latest Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics, there are 925 million hungry people in the world and 98 percent of them are in developing countries.
They are distributed like this: 578 million in Asia and the Pacific 239 million in Sub-Saharan Africa 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean 37 million in the Near East and North Africa 19 million in developed countries NUMBER OF HUNGRY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD 925 million hungry people RURAL RISK: Three-quarters of all hungry people live in rural areas, mainly in the villages of Asia and Africa. Overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture for their food, these populations have no alternative source of income or employment.
As a result, they are vulnerable to crises. Many migrate to cities in their search for employment, swelling the ever-expanding populations of shanty towns in developing countries. FARMERS: FAO calculates that 75 percent of the hungry people in developing countries, half are farming families, surviving off marginal lands prone to natural disasters like drought or flood. One in five belongs to landless families dependent on farming and about 10 percent live in communities whose livelihoods depend on herding, fishing or forest resources.
The remaining 25 percent live in shanty towns on the periphery of the biggest cities in developing countries. The numbers of poor and hungry city dwellers are rising rapidly along with the world’s total urban population. CHILDREN: An estimated 146 million children in developing countries are underweight – the result of acute or chronic hunger (Source: The State of the World’s Children, UNICEF, 2009). All too often, child hunger is inherited: up to 17 million children are born underweight annually, the result of inadequate nutrition before and during pregnancy. WOMEN:
Women are the world’s primary food producers, yet cultural traditions and social structures often mean women are much more affected by hunger and poverty than men. A mother who is stunted or underweight due to an inadequate diet often give birth to low birth weight children. Around 50 per cent of pregnant women in developing countries are iron deficient (source: UNICEF). Lack of iron means 315,000 women die annually from hemorrhage at childbirth. As a result, women, and in particular expectant and nursing mothers, often need special or increased intake of food.
WHO ARE MOST AT RISK OF HUNGER? Three main groups are most at risk of hunger: the rural poor, the urban poor, and victims of catastrophes. THE RURAL POOR: The majority of the people who don’t have enough to eat live in poor, rural communities in developing countries. Many have no electricity and no safe drinking water. Public health, education and sanitation services are often of low quality. The world’s most food-insecure and hungry people are often directly involved in producing food. They cultivate crops on small plots of land. They raise animals. They catch fish.
They do what they can to provide food for their families or earn money at the local produce market. Many have no land of their own and work as hired hands to earn enough money to get by. Often the work is seasonal, and the family must move or split up to earn a living. It is hard work and it is difficult to set anything aside in case of an emergency. Even when there is enough food, the threat of hunger is always present. THE URBAN POOR: The urban poor constitute another group that is at risk of hunger. They produce little or no food and frequently lack the means to buy food.
Cities are expanding constantly. In the year 2000, nearly two billion people lived in cities; by 2030, this figure will have more than doubled. As the cities expand, and as more people will migrate from rural to urban areas, the number of the urban poor will rise. Urban hunger and access to affordable food in cities will therefore be increasingly important issues. VICTIMS OF CATASTROPHES: Every year floods, droughts, earthquakes and other natural disasters as well as armed conflicts cause widespread destruction and force families to abandon their homes and farms.
Victims of catastrophes are often faced with the threat not just of hunger but of outright starvation. THE NUMBER OF UNDERNOURISHED: The following table shows the list of the countries of the world where undernourishment has the greatest impact. With their large populations, India and China have the most citizens living in hunger. TOP TEN HUNGER COUNTRIES Country| | India| 237. 7| China| 130. 4| Bangladesh| 41. 7| Democratic Republic of Congo| 41. 9| Pakistan| 43. 4| Ethiopia| 31. 6| Tanzania| 13. 7| Philippines| 13. 2| Brazil| 12. 1| Vietnam| 9. 6|
HUNGER IN PAKISTAN: Pakistan continues to be subject to considerable socio-political, economic and environmental volatility, and in 2010 experienced its worst natural disaster in living memory. What started as monsoon-related flash flooding in the country’s north, later developed into a crisis of national and unprecedented proportions. As rivers swelled to more than ten or twenty times their typical size, almost one-fifth of the country’s total landmass was submerged. Infrastructure, power and telecommunications systems were severely damaged or destroyed entirely.
Millions of people were left without access to food, clean drinking water or health services, posing an enormous threat to their survival. Amid severe damage to the agricultural sector, one of the country’s economic mainstays, people’s prospects for recovering their livelihoods were severely threatened. The government estimated that some 20 million people across the country were affected by the crisis, of which more than 10 million were found to be in need of immediate assistance. At the same time, militant extremism still exacts a heavy social and financial toll in Pakistan.
Military operations in the north-west continue, as do terrorist attacks against both government and civilian targets. Economic turbulence, power shortages and high food and fuel prices exacerbate instability, with unemployment on the increase and wage levels unable to keep pace with an inflation rate estimated at 16 percent by the end of 2010. One result of these recurrent natural and man-made crises has been a sharp decline in food security across the country, despite sufficient national food production to meet the needs of Pakistan’s 170 million people.
By 2009, almost 50 percent of the population, or 83 million people, were food insecure, up from 38 percent in 2003. In the aftermath of the flooding, it is believed that this figure may yet have risen to upwards of 90 million. Similarly, disparities in socio-economic indicators between rural and urban populations have continued to widen, and progress in narrowing the gender gap remains limited. Women face considerable difficulties in finding employment and accessing education opportunities, particularly in areas where insecurity constrains mobility.
Recent assessments show no improvement in Pakistan’s 57 percent literacy rate or worryingly poor nutritional indicators recorded in 2001: including 13 percent wasting among children aged 6-59 months, with levels of stunting and underweight at 37 and 38 percent respectively. A third of all child deaths are associated with malnutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies are widespread. An estimated 45 percent of women and 67 percent of children under five are anemic. PAKISTAN: 8 HUNGER FACTS: Pakistan already suffered high levels of malnutrition and food insecurity before the flooding began.
The monsoon floods in August hit a country already grappling with high levels of malnutrition, high food prices and a humanitarian crisis along its border with Afghanistan. Here are eight facts that show the full extent of hunger and poverty in Pakistan. 1) 20 MILLION AFFECTED BY THE FLOODS: The Pakistan floods this summer impacted the lives and livelihoods of some 20 million people, around 10 million of whom required emergency food assistance. 2) NEARLY ONE IN TWO PAKISTANIS AT RISK: Pakistan suffered from widespread hunger even before the monsoon floods, with an estimated 82. million people – a little less than half the population – estimated to be food insecure. 3) WIDESPREAD POVERTY: An estimated 36 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line and almost half are illiterate. Poorer households typically spend over 60 percent of their income on food. 4) POOR SANITATION: 50 percent of all Pakistanis have little or no access to clean toilets and drinking water, a condition that renders them vulnerable to infectious diseases. 5) CHILD MORTALITY: The biggest killers of children under five in Pakistan are diarrhea and acute respiratory infections.
Undernourishment is an underlying cause in 38 percent of those cases. 6) VIOLENT CONFLICT: Conflict along Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan has forced millions of people to flee their homes. 7) RISING HUNGER: Volatile food prices over the past seven years have pushed the number of people who depend on food assistance in Pakistan from 38 percent of the population in 2003 to 49 percent in 2009. 8) WHEAT DEPENDENT: Wheat is Pakistan’s main staple crop and most important source of calories.
As a result of the flooding, which submerged around 16 percent of all arable land in Pakistan, the upcoming wheat harvest is expected to be around 15 percent smaller than usual. EFFECTS OF CHRONIC HUNGER: Chronic hunger has far reaching impacts on individuals and their families and, by extension, on communities and whole societies. Chronic hunger — or food insecurity — is as devastating to families, communities, and countries as is famine. Chronic hunger claims more victims than famine each year — by far. Effects of chronic hunger include: HIGH INFANT MORTALITY RATES:
Malnourished women are more likely to be sick, have smaller babies, and die earlier, resulting in high levels of infant mortality in areas where chronic hunger is a problem. And where infant and child mortality is high, birth rates are also high, locking these communities in a vicious cycle of malnutrition and death. VULNERABILITY TO COMMON ILLNESSES: More than two million children die every year from dehydration caused by diarrhea. A malnourished child often lacks the strength to survive a severe case of diarrhea. INCREASED RISK OF INFECTION: A malnourished child has a weakened immune system, making the child more vulnerable to infection.
Infections cause lack of appetite and further compromise the child’s ability to fight off recurrent and lingering infections. ACUTE VULNERABILITY IN TIMES OF DISASTER: A community’s poorest families are already living on the edge of survival. Unexpected shocks, such as crop failure, floods, epidemics, locusts or typhoons result in devastation and almost certain death to some members of the family. IMPEDIMENTS TO DEVELOPMENT: Chronic hunger deprives children of the essential proteins, micronutrients and fatty acids they need to grow adequately.
Globally, it is estimated that nearly 226 million children are stunted — shorter than they should be. In addition, stunted children score significantly lower on intelligence tests than do normal children. IMPEDIMENTS TO ECONOMIC GROWTH: For the nearly 67 million children who weigh less than they should due to chronic hunger, completing school is an unlikely reality. Studies have shown that underweight children will probably spend fewer years in school, which, in turn, has a measurable impact on how much they earn in adulthood. CAUSES OF HUNGER:
Food has never before existed in such abundance, so why are 925 million people in the world going hungry? In purely quantitative terms, there is enough food available to feed the entire global population of 7 billion people. And yet, one in nearly seven people is going hungry. One in three children is underweight. Why does hunger exist? NATURE: Natural disasters such as floods, tropical storms and long periods of drought are on the increase — with calamitous consequences for food security cause famine, hunger, and poverty in areas of the world that are already predisposed to crisis.
In regions where food production and availability is only marginally sufficient to provide a sustainable food supply for its population, this precarious predicament intensifies when drought or other natural disasters wipe out entire crops. Once a region’s food production and supply has been severely degraded, it becomes increasingly necessary for that region to import food and supplies. However, many of these countries lack the funding and supportive government infrastructure that will allow for the necessary, life-saving food and supplies to be brought into the country.
In many countries, climate change is exacerbating already adverse natural conditions. For example, poor farmers in Ethiopia or Guatemala traditionally deal with rain failure by selling off livestock to cover their losses and pay for food. But successive years of drought, increasingly common in the Horn of Africa and Central America, are exhausting their resources. WAR: Since 1992, the proportion of short and long-term food crises that can be attributed to human causes has more than doubled, rising from 15 percent to more than 35 percent. All too often, these emergencies are triggered by conflicts.
From Asia to Africa to Latin America, fighting displaces millions of people from their homes, leading to some of the world’s worst hunger emergencies. Since 2004, conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan has uprooted more than a million people, precipitating a major food crisis — in an area that had generally enjoyed good rains and crops. In war, food sometimes becomes a weapon. Soldiers will starve opponents into submission by seizing or destroying food and livestock and systematically wrecking local markets. Fields and water wells are often mined or contaminated, forcing farmers to abandon their land.
When conflict threw Central Africa into confusion in the 1990s, the proportion of hungry people rose from 53 percent to 58 percent. By comparison, malnutrition is on the retreat in more peaceful parts of Africa such as Ghana and Malawi. POVERTY TRAP: Poverty is at the core of the world hunger crisis. The regions across the world that are subjected to extreme poverty conditions are at more risk to have their terrible situation exacerbated by outside forces such as natural disasters and war/conflict, thereby further deepening their difficult situation. “In short, the poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty. World Food Programme In developing countries, farmers often cannot afford seed to plant the crops that would provide for their families. Craftsmen lack the means to pay for the tools to ply their trade. Others have no land or water or education to lay the foundations for a secure future. As time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult for individuals, communities, and countries to come out from underneath the heavy blanket of poverty. As the World Food Programme states: “The poverty/stricken do not have enough money to buy or produce enough food for themselves and their families.
In turn, they tend to be weaker and cannot produce enough to buy more food. ” They are caught in a horrible cycle. AGRICULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE: In the long-term, improved agricultural output offers the quickest fix for poverty and hunger. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2004 Food Insecurity Report, all the countries that are on track to reach the first Millennium Development Goal have something in common — significantly better than average agricultural growth. Yet too many developing countries lack key agricultural infrastructure, such as enough roads, warehouses and irrigation.
The results are high transport costs, lack of storage facilities and unreliable water supplies. All conspire to limit agricultural yields and access to food. But, although the majority of developing countries depend on agriculture, their governments economic planning often emphasizes urban development. OVER-EXPLOITATION OF ENVIRONMENT: Poor farming practices, deforestation, over cropping and overgrazing are exhausting the Earth’s fertility and spreading the roots of hunger. Increasingly, the world’s fertile farmland is under threat from erosion, salination and desertification.
HARMFUL AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES: As rural populations increase, land is divided into small plots, without sufficient inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, which eventually leads to soil degradation. Formerly, the technique of shifting cultivation allowed a long fallow period during which soil fertility would build up to its previous level. Today, population pressure and the struggle for improved yields are cutting the fallow period back to virtually nothing. Under such conditions, the soil soon loses its fertility and begins to erode.
Essentially, this is because the land is being farmed beyond its capability. Another problem is the clearing forests. This upsets the ecological balance, often exposing soils that cannot support continued crop production. Soil degradation can be brought about by a lack of technical skills and of proper tools for working the land. COMMUNITIES IN CRISIS: Physical suffering is only the initial impact of hunger and famine on impoverished individuals. Over time, every aspect of normal life is compromised and drastically diminished for entire families and communities.
This “behavioral shift [creates] an emotional analogue in apathy (including reduced appetite) and irritability. The costs are obviously reductions in work, in socializing, and, for children, in the interaction with their environment that contributes to their learning and development. ” As communities fall prey to hunger, the effects of poverty deepen, spreading through entire regions and countries. In fact, “whole populations may be forced to migrate in search of food, in the process disrupting development potential in a locality or region and encouraging political disorder and conflict. 7 Eventually, chronic, widespread hunger destroys generations of individuals who are trapped in a life which is full of sadness and almost insurmountable barriers. “The most reliable defense against war seems to be economic growth. ” The Economist SOLUTIONS TO WORLD HUNGER: At first glance, many people would say that assistance in the form of food donations (food aid) should be sent to the worst affected countries by those who have plenty. Certainly this is a first and essential step in emergencies, and nearly 10 million tons of cereals are provided each year to poorer countries as food aid.
But food aid is not a lasting solution to the problem. If poorly planned and delivered, food aid can even have a harmful effect on the country that receives it, by upsetting local customs and eating habits. By depressing the market prices, it can cut into the income of local farmers, and it can discourage the local production and use of traditional crops. Therefore, an ACTION PLAN AGAINST HUNGER must include the following measures; Promoting greater self-reliance in countries suffering from hunger – hence reducing dependency on imports.
Re-examining farm policies in developing countries to make sure that they encourage – rather than discourage – farmers to produce food on a dependable basis. Policies should aim to ensure fair prices for farm produce, access to the means of production, and wise land and water use. Improving transportation, marketing and storage systems to ensure that available food reaches areas where and when it is needed most. Re-examining food aid to make sure it reaches the hungry but does not disrupt national production.
Greater co-operation among developed and developing nations to remove trade barriers and help stabilize international prices for agricultural commodities. Avoiding over consumption and the waste of food in all countries. A realistic approach to the problems of large debts owed by many Third World countries and their consequent need to devote inordinate proportions of export earnings to repaying loans. The debt burden hinders the ability of governments to make necessary investments in the food and agricultural sector.
