Stark and Unsettling Facts about World Poverty and World Hunger

» More than 854 million people in the world go hungry.
» One child dies of hunger-related causes every five seconds, equating to 16,000 poor and hungry children each day.
» Rising food prices may soon tip 100 million more hungry people to the edge of starvation.
» The prices of wheat, corn, rice, and soy have doubled or tripled in the past three years.

Throughout the world these increased food prices are taking an unprecedented toll, from developed countries like the United States, where a record 28 million hungry people will rely on food stamps in 2008, to third world countries like Haiti and Kenya, where a desperate need for food leads to rioting in the streets. Two years ago, the World Food Summit participants promised to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015; instead, there has been a dramatic increase in hungry people in developing countries.  The ones that suffer the most are the poor and hungry children.

Causes of Food Crisis

Most experts agree on the primary reasons for the recent and projected increases in global food prices. The record price of fuel pushes up the cost of food production, packaging, storing,
and transportation. The cost of fertilizer has tripled in the U.S. and by perhaps as much as fifty times in Kenya. World food stocks are at record lows. The United States, often called the  breadbasket of the world, finds its grain silos as empty as the 1970’s, when the Soviet Union bought most of its reserves.
The world population will soon reach 6.8 billion, an awful lot of hungry mouths to feed. Fast growing  economies in developing nations impact available food supplies in several ways: 1) Urban expansion pulls people from rural areas, creating a smaller agricultural work force as well as a loss of farm land. According to “The Road to the Horizon” (www.theroadtothehorizon.blogspot.com.), China has lost an average of over one million
hectares of farmland annually, so must now look to foreign farms to feed its 1.3 billion people. 2) Wealthy people eat more meat. Producing one pound of beef takes seven pounds of grain! 3) Emerging economies, particularly India and China, put pressure on resources of not only food, but also land, water, and oil.
Droughts, particularly in Australia, have dramatically reduced available wheat and rice. Biofuel policies gobble up grains, especially corn. Some countries, including India, Vietnam, Egypt,
and Brazil, are limiting or banning exports of food in order to protect their own populations of poor and needy.
Market economy speculation based on supply and demand— and profit—works to drive up prices. The future’s market allows farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time, sometimes before they’ve even been planted! Investors buy low, betting that the price will go up, as it surely has done in recent times. This factor alone has doubled the price of rice since last August.
In the face of this crisis, giant agribusinesses are making record profits. Monsanto reported a doubling of its net income for the three months up to the end of February compared to 2007.
Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world’s largest fertilizer providers, reported a twelve-fold increase in income during that period! (Cited at www.independent.co.uk.)
A complicating factor for farmers all over the world is that big business (primarily Monsanto again) actually owns the patents on thousands of seeds. Genetically modified plants dominate the fields of the United States, and increasingly, the world. Currently 91% of soybeans in the
U.S. are a biotech variety and Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans are the most widely planted, geneticallymodified crop in the world (cited in “World Ark,” May/June 2008). It has been said that those who control the seeds control the food supply of the world. If that is true, it may be that the future of food in the world, and the plight of billions of poor and hungry people, depends on the ethics of big companies.

The above is part of an article adapted from the July issue of Spotlight on Orphans newsletter.  Spotlight on Orphans newsletter is published monthly by Hearth to Hearth Ministries which is working to reduce the number of poor and hungry children by helping over 600 African orphans in 5 orphanages in Kenya and Uganda Africa.

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