Saturday, April 9, 2011

An effect of Poverty - Hunger

Poverty is the principal cause of hunger. The causes of poverty include poor people's lack of resources, an extremely unequal income distribution in the world and within specific countries, conflict, and hunger itself. As of 2008 (2005 statistics), the World Bank has estimated that there were an estimated 1,345 million poor people in developing countries who live on $1.25 a day or less.This compares to the later FAO estimate of 1.02 billion undernourished people. Extreme poverty remains an alarming problem in the world’s developing regions, despite some progress that reduced "dollar--now $1.25-- a day" poverty from 1900 million people in 1981, a reduction of 29 percent over the period. Progress in poverty reduction has been concentrated in Asia, and especially, East Asia, with the major improvement occurring in China. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people in extreme poverty has increased



Number of hungry people in the world


As the figure below shows, the number of hungry people has increased since 1995-97, though the number is down from last year. The increase has been due to three factors:
1) neglect of agriculture relevant to very poor people by governments and international agencies
2) the current worldwide economic crisis
3) the significant increase of food prices in the last several years which has been devastating to those with only a few dollars a day to spend.
925 million people is 13.6 percent of the estimated world population of 6.8 billion. Nearly all of the undernourished are in developing countries.

2 comments:

  1. "There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
    -Mahatma Gandhi-

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