Skip navigation
CWS Resources Back to CWS home
Hotline | Newsroom | Resources | Search
Programs | About | How to Help | Donate

Pdf file Download PDF version • Order online

Hunger in a World of Plenty

Children from Colombia
Photo: Samuel Lobato/CWS

There is food enough for all, yet hunger persists. Hunger continues to plague our world because people either do not have access to food or cannot afford to buy the food that is available. Over 850 million people around the world don’t have enough to eat. Nearly one in three children worldwide is hungry. Most live in the so-called “developing world.” But hunger haunts us at home, too. And the number of poor and hungry among our fellow citizens continues to rise. While the world has made great strides in the struggle against hunger, we are a long way from realizing the benchmark of the Millennium Development Goals to cut in half the proportion of people who suffer hunger by the year 2015. The roots of hunger are found in poverty, war, inequitable agricultural policies and trade patterns, ignorance, and disease. There are solutions. Creative initiatives by impoverished people supported by donor organizations are making a difference. If we work together, we can fashion a world that works for all.

Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice…
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor
into your house... and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Isaiah 58:6-7

My experience working has given me an unshakable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue.
Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner, 2006

A HUNGRY WORLD

  • 854 million people are hungry – That’s about equal to the entire population of the western hemisphere.
    FAO/Population Reference Bureau

  • Each day almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes – one every five seconds.
    FAO

  • Most of these people are not victims of famine that so dominates our news, but suffer from what the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calls a “covert famine” of chronic hunger and malnutrition, stunting growth, sapping energy and potential.
    FAO

  • Hunger and malnutrition are the number one risk to global health, killing more people than AIDS, malaria, and TB combined.
    World Food Program (WFP)

  • Amount U.S. spends annually on foreign aid – $20.7 billion. Amount people in the U.S. annually spend on diet and weight loss products – $34.7 billion.
    Council on Foreign Relations/Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

HUNGER AT HOME

  • 35.1 million Americans – one in ten households – live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. About one-third are children. Though most poor families in the U.S. are working families, the low wages earned by millions of U.S. workers are not enough to cover the cost of housing, medical care, child care, transportation, clothing, and food. Employment is simply not enough to safeguard against hunger and poverty.
    Household Food Security in the United States, 2005/Bread for the World

  • If all 35.1 million Americans faced with food insecurity stood in line at a food pantry in New York City, the line would stretch to Los Angeles and back. Twice.
    2000 Census

  • In 2006, an average of 26.7 million people used food stamps each month – about 1 million more people per month than in 2005.
    USDA
Man leading a cow in Cambodia
Photo: CWS Cambodia

Millennium Development Goals: A global commitment of compassion

In September 2000, 189 countries, including the United States, endorsed goals to cut in half the percentage of people living in extreme poverty and substantially improve health and education in impoverished countries by 2015. They represent the clearest indication to date of a global consensus on the most pressing needs of the human family and specific, measurable goals to alleviate them:

  1. ERADICATE EXTREME HUNGER AND POVERTY
  2. ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION
  3. PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWER WOMEN
  4. REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY
  5. IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH
  6. COMBAT HIV/AIDS, MALARIA AND OTHER DISEASES
  7. ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
  8. DEVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT

ROOTS OF HUNGER

Woman and baby in Angola
Photo: Tammi Mott/CWS

Poverty: 1.1 billion people in developing countries live on an income of $1 a day or less. While poverty has declined in some areas, especially East Asia, in other regions, especially Africa, the number of persons living in extreme poverty has increased. Living at such a marginal level means an incredible vulnerability to changes in climate, crop prices, health problems.
FAO

Powerlessness: Hungry people often feel, and are, unable to affect their circumstances due to illiteracy, political oppression, or lack of access to land, credit, education, and political decision-making. If they are women, children, or ethnic minorities, they are even more vulnerable.
Grace at the Table

Debt: Debt obligations, often amassed by long-gone leaders, leave vulnerable nations with vastly reduced resources to meet people’s needs. Despite recent efforts at debt relief, some countries are still spending more on debt repayment than on education, health care, and nutrition combined.
Jubilee Network

Gender: Sixty to 80 percent of farmers in the developing world are women. In sub-Saharan Africa, women account for 75 percent of household food production. Yet women own only a fraction of the world’s farmland and receive a fraction of agricultural extension services (less than 10%). Seventy percent of those who suffer from hunger worldwide are women and girls.
Bread/World Food Program

Violence and militarism: Civil conflict disrupts agriculture, uproots people, destroys infrastructure, increases debt from military expenditure, and drains precious resources from social programs. Landmines used in the conflicts leave a lethal legacy to returning farmers, their families, and their livestock. At present there are some 14 million refugees and 21 million internally displaced persons worldwide.
U.S. Committee for Refugees

Population: Increasing populations test the limits of fragile environments and further tax impoverished nations’ abilities to meet their people’s education, health, and nutritional needs. Children, especially boys, are the only form of social security many parents will ever know. So in Africa, where a child is 20 times more likely to die by age 5 than in the U.S., it may make sense to have a large family.
Grace at the Table

Globalization: Booming foreign investment combined with the electronic integration of international markets knits the world into a single global economy, stimulating growth and economic opportunity for some, impoverishment and unemployment for many others. To take just one example, the farm policies of industrialized countries, like the U.S., contribute to the persistence of hunger. Subsidies play a role in lowering crop prices and encouraging overproduction. Cheap imported products glut developing country markets, undermining the livelihood of small-holder farmers. The gap between rich and poor increases daily.
UNDP/Bread for the World/CWS

Nicholas Stern, the World Bank’s chief economist, once pointed out that each day, the average European cow receives $2.50 in subsidies while 75 percent of the people in Africa are scrimping by on less than $2.00.
“Why People Still Starve”

AIDS: AIDS has killed around 7 million agricultural workers since 1985 in the 25 worst affected African countries. The links between AIDS and hunger are chillingly simple. As farmers fall ill, their ability to plow, plant, cultivate, and harvest declines, leading to less available food. Food security is further threatened by the diversion of time, energy, and money to deal with the illness. Agricultural households revert to subsistence rather than cash crop farming, resulting in less family income and less food produced for the nation as a whole. Moreover, the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another about how to farm is being broken, with frightening implications for future food shortages.
Africa Recovery

Iyakaremye with his cow
Photo: CWS

MAKING A DIFFERENCE!

Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mohandas Gandhi

Crafting a world without hunger will require the best efforts of us all. Real progress has been made – hunger has declined globally. Impoverished people are reclaiming their lives and their communities with the support of groups like Church World Service. You can help through CROP Hunger Walks, Tools & Blankets events, One Great Hour of Sharing, volunteering in a soup kitchen, writing a letter to Congress, and more. Be part of the solution!

Giving Hope

The CWS Giving Hope program began as a small pilot program with the YWCA of Rwanda to protect the rights of orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS, and to equip them with the skills they need to become self-supporting. The program has been so successful, it is now being employed in three other countries and reaches over 8,500 child-headed households.

When Iyakaremye (at right above) was orphaned, he sought work in the Rwandan capital, leaving his two school-age sisters behind. The Giving Hope program convinced him to return, and with a group of 28 other children, he began a beekeeping operation. With their beekeeping profits, the group began a revolving loan program, through which Iyakaremye bought four goats. They’ve multiplied, and he has now repaid his loan and recently purchased his first cow. During the past season, Iyarkaremye and his sisters had a better harvest of corn, beans, and bananas than many of their adult neighbors. And, through Iyakaremye’s efforts, his two sisters have returned to school. Dreams can come true.

Roberto Muj and CIEDEG participants
Photo: Rolanda Hughes/CWS

Cultivating a New Tomorrow

In Guatemala, where more than 50 percent of people live in poverty, 650 indigenous families in the mountainous Totonicapán district are learning to overcome the challenges of growing vegetables in their rocky terrain and cool climate. With support from Church World Service and Foods Resource Bank, the Conference of Evangelical Churches in Guatemala (CIEDEG) teaches families ways to increase food production on their small parcels, develop new water collection methods, improve family nutrition, and share what they’ve learned with other members of their community. Where the ground was too rocky to grow vegetables, they are transforming tires into vegetable planters.

“It’s a big hit,” says CIEDEG Program Director Roberto Muj (pictured at far right). “The response from women and children to the tire project has been great. The children don’t think they’re working, but that they’re playing when they make a garden in old tires.”

Trade Justice

Church World Service participates in regional and global networks of churches and civil society organizations, such as the Interfaith Working Group on Trade and the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, advocating for changes in U.S. trade policy and the rules of international trade. CWS and its partners support trade policies that will bring broad-based benefits to developing countries and help achieve the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. We oppose trade policies that pressure developing countries to open their borders to U.S. goods and services – such as heavily subsidized agricultural products – in ways that undermine local economies and destroy jobs. Sign up for Church World Service Speak Out e-mails to receive action alerts on world hunger, food security, and trade justice at www.churchworldservice.org, and urge public policymakers to act to alleviate world hunger.

Women in Angola
Photo: Tammi Mott/CWS

Poverty is like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to be free.
A young woman in Jamaica

VOICES

The issue of hunger is often presented as a series of numbers – numbers of undernourished, numbers of refugees, numbers in famine-like circumstances. It is, sometimes, hard to remember that the numbers represent individual people with hopes and dreams in the midst of extraordinary struggle. Here are the words of hungry people speaking to their reality and our challenge.
Poverty is like heat: You cannot see it; so to know poverty, you have to go through it.
Ghana		 We poor people are invisible to others – just as blind people cannot see, they cannot see us.
Pakistan		 Mother and child in Pakistan
Chris Herlinger/CWS
There is nothing to eat. We’re constantly hungry…. My life is just grief.
Ukraine		 Lack of work worries me. My children were hungry and I told them the rice was cooking, until they fell asleep from hunger.
Egypt
Woman from Cambodia
Cambodia/CWS
 Pakistan earthquake survivor
Paul Jeffrey/ACT-CWS

Poverty is lack of freedom, enslaved by crushing daily burdens, by depression and fear of what the future will bring.
Republic of Georgia

 Family
Jim Hackbarth for CWS

It wasn’t my turn. Response of a U.S. child who had fallen asleep at school when asked if he had eaten breakfast that morning.
Grace at the Table
What is poverty? To come home and see your children go hungry and not have anything to give them.
Brazil		 Boy
Paul Jeffrey/ACT-CWS
 Poverty is inherited. If you were born to a poor father, he cannot educate you and cannot give you any land, or very little land of poor quality; every generation gets poorer.
Uganda		 Woman in Guatemala
Rolanda Hughes/CWS
Poverty for me is the fact that we bought some black flour with our last money, some flour cheaper than the rest. When we baked the bread it was inedible. We were speechless and ate it by force since we did not have anything else.
Macedonia

Most of these quotes come from a remarkable collection at the website Voices of the Poor: www1.worldbank.org/prem/poverty/voices

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

Support the work of Church World Service

Learn more, teach others

  • NEW! Making Poverty History: Hunger Education Activities that Work. A 26-page collection of skits, simulations, and worship materials on hunger, poverty, and the Millennium Development Goals. 1-10 copies: FREE! 11-99 copies: $1each (+ $5 shipping/handling). Please pre-pay: CWS, P. O. Box 968, Elkhart, IN 46515. For more information or bulk rates call 800-297-1516.

  • Visit our educational resources page, for free-loan AVs in our CWS Video & Film Library, and our online simulation, Hungry Decisions.

  • CWS collaborated with the Presbyterian Hunger Program and Advocate Health Care in the development of Just Eating? Practicing Our Faith at the Table. The seven-session resource for high school and adult congregational groups explores the relationship between our faith and food. You may download the material or order in printed form at www.pcusa.org/hunger/features/justeating.htm

  • Tell others in your congregation, organization, family what you have learned. Consider organizing a hunger education event, perhaps around World Food Day (Oct. 16). For more information on World Food Day see www.worldfooddayusa.org or call 202-653-2404.

Exercise your citizenship

  • Speak Out for hungry people around the world using our online advocacy resources. All the tools you need to communicate with your elected representatives and the media are there: www.churchworldservice.org/Educ_Advo

  • Participate in Bread for the World’s annual Offering of Letters. Campaigns address both domestic and international hunger concerns. For more information: www.bread.org or 800-822-7323. Extend yourself. Volunteer at your local food pantry or soup kitchen. Organize a community garden project. Join or start a CROP Hunger Walk in your community.

  • Look at your eating habits. Read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007).

See more useful sites on our Hunger & Poverty links page.

Sources

Oh God, to those who have hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give a hunger for justice.
Latin American prayer

CWS logo

Church World Service is a cooperative ministry of 35 Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican denominations, providing sustainable self-help and development, disaster relief, and refugee assistance in some 80 countries.

Church World Service P.O. Box 968 Elkhart, IN 46515 800-297-1516
www.churchworldservice.org

Back to top • More Facts Have Faces