HUNGER FACTS
Scope of the problem
An estimated 852 million people in the developing world currently do not consume enough calories to sustain healthy bodies.
What is hunger?
Hunger is when people do not get enough food to provide the nutrients (carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals and water) for active and healthy lives.
Malnutrition results from a lack of calories and/or inadequate consumption of one or more nutrients such as Vitamin A or iodine.
Famine is a situation of extreme scarcity of food, potentially leading to widespread starvation, which is defined as extreme suffering or death from prolonged lack of food.
Hunger kills
Did you know every day 24,000 people die from hunger and hunger-related causes? Of those, 18,000 are children. One person dies of hunger every 3.6 seconds. That is more than 16 people each minute; 1,000 each hour; which translates into 8,760,000 every single year! One in six people on the planet is hungry.
More fatal than war
An estimated 17 percent of all deaths in the world are due to malnutrition and unsafe water. In the last 50 years, more than 418 million people have died from hunger and poor sanitation–nearly three times the number of people who died in all wars of the 20th century.
Chronic hunger
Chronic hunger reduces the body’s ability to function and leads to a weakened state, leaving a person more susceptible to disease. It’s these preventable illnesses that often lead to death. When hunger progresses into starvation, the body literally eats up all its reserves of protein and energy. At this point, even with intervention, a victim may be so weak that he or she may not recover.
Hungers real causes
World population is not the reason for itcontrary to what some might believe. The real reason nearly one billion of the planets six billion people are undernourished is because of food-distribution problems, natural disasters, government policies
civil unrest, inequitable trade policies, lack of knowledge and greed.
What were doing
Food for the Hungry currently impacts individuals in 46 countries, attempting to alleviate hunger and malnutrition in the world. At Food for the Hungry, we are accountable before God and before our donors to use gifts in the best way possible. We give 93 percent of our resource income to field programs and relief interventions.
What you can do
Food for the Hungry offers many ways to help. Perhaps you want to sponsor a child or join our Prayer Network. Or you can join our overseas volunteers for a few weeks with our Short-term Team Ministry or a few years through our Hunger Corps program. Or, you can donate online www.fh.org or by calling 1-800-2-HUNGERS.
About Us
Food for the Hungry currently impacts individuals in 46 countries providing emergency relief and implementing development programs throughout the world. This includes our field programs, exploratory programs and presence of our local-country offices (National Organizations). We help the world’s most disadvantaged people through child-development programs, agriculture and clean-water projects, health and nutrition programs, micro-enterprise loans and education; teaching communities to become self-sustaining. We are a Christian organization founded in 1971 by Dr. Larry Ward. For more information please visit www.fh.org