Hunger

For most of us, hunger is short-term, with a simple and foreseeable solution: easy access to a wide array of food and nutrition choices. But for over 850 million people in the world, hunger is a daily, inescapable reality.

According to the World Food Programme, “one in nearly seven people do 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.” Not only are the risk factors facing malnourished people dramatic, the results are catastrophic. Estimates indicate that 53 percent of deaths among pre-school age children in the developing world are due to complications caused by malnutrition on top of diseases such as measles, pneumonia and diarrhea.
“Hunger and malnutrition are the underlying cause of more than half of all child deaths, killing nearly 6 million children each year.”

- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

The world has the resources to address all the problems [of hunger] with the technology and the global wealth that exists. However, do we have the will and commitment to do so? The many causes of hunger and malnutrition seem simple; yet ending hunger remains difficult to achieve. In order to understand the elusive solution, we need first to examine the interconnectedness of the root causes of persistent famine and malnutrition.