Did you know?
www.globalissues.com
Number
of children in the world
2.2
billion
Number in poverty
1 billion (every second child)
Shelter,
safe water and health
For the 1.9 billion children from the
developing world, there are:
·
640
million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
· 400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
· 270 million with no access to health services
(1 in 7)
Number in poverty
1 billion (every second child)
Survival for children
Worldwide,
· 10.6 million died in 2003 before they
reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
· 1.4 million die each year from lack of
access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation
According to UNICEF, 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some
of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life
makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.
Startling:
1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometre, but not in their house or
yard, consume around 20 litres per day. In the United Kingdom the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing
toilets (where average daily water usage is about 150 liters a day. The highest average water use in the world is in the US,
at 600 liters day.)
Consider this: Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998
| Global Priority | $U.S. Billions |
| Cosmetics in the United States | 8 |
| Ice
cream in Europe
| 11 |
| Perfumes
in Europe and the United States
| 12 |
| Pet
foods in Europe and the United States | 17 |
| Business entertainment in Japan | 35 |
|
Cigarettes
in Europe |
50 |
| Alcoholic
drinks in Europe
| 105 |
| Narcotics
drugs in the world
| 400 |
| Military
spending in the world
| 780 |
And compare
that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing
countries:
| Global
Priority
| $U.S. Billions |
| Basic
education for all
| 6 |
| Water
and sanitation for all
| 9 |
| Reproductive
health for all women
| 12 |
| Basic
health and nutrition
| 13 |
(www.globalissues.com)
Interesting
Read:
Holt-Giménez
and Peabody summarize the issue quite well:
The food crisis appeared to explode
overnight, reinforcing fears that there are just too many people in the world. But according to the FAO, with record grain
harvests in 2007, there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone—at least 1.5 times current demand. In
fact, over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2.0% a year, while the rate of population growth
has dropped to 1.14% a year. Population is not outstripping food supply. “We’re seeing more people hungry and
at greater numbers than before,” says World Hunger Program’s executive director Josette Sheeran, “There
is food on the shelves but people are priced out of the market.”
For example,
- A lot
of land goes into producing products that could be considered unnecessary or excessive in their production (some examples
discussed on this site include: tobacco, sugar and beef).
- Some 80% of the world’s production is consumed
by the wealthiest 20% of the world suggesting an inequality in resource use due to social, economic and political
reasons, and perhaps less because of Malthusian concerns about population sizes outstripping resource availability in
most cases.
- Furthermore, while many go hungry an equally large number are considered obese.
However, as Holt-Giménez and Peabody importantly add, all these causes “are only the proximate causes of
food price inflation. These factors do not explain why—in an increasingly productive and affluent global food system—next
year up to one billion people will likely go hungry. To solve the problem of hunger, we need to address the root cause of
the food crisis: the corporate monopolization of the world’s food systems.”
— Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody,
From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty: Urgent call to fix a broken food system, Institute for Food and Development Policy, May 16, 2008
As professor
Richard Robbins notes, food is a commodity:
To understand why people go hungry you
must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies
produce for other people to buy.
- Food is a commodity.…
- Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities
such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally
nutritious, but for which there is a large market.
- Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture
cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.
- More
than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock,
grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed.…
The problem, of course, is that people who don’t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people
earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don’t count in the food equation.
- In other words, if you don’t have the money
to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.
- Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture
clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less;
likewise, you would not expect ADM (“Supermarket to the World”) to produce food for them.
… What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that
people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food.
— Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty,
Hunger, and Economic Development
http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/foodinsecurity2005.pdf?docID=482
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_report.html
Hunger
Persists in the U.S.
Thirty-three
million people including 13 million children live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents
one in ten households in the United States.(1)
3.1 percent of U.S. households experience hunger: they frequently
skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. Nearly 8.5 million people, including 2.9 million
children, live in these homes. (1)
7.3 percent of U.S. households are at risk of hunger: they have lower quality
diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need. 24.7 million people,
including 9.9 million children, live in these homes. (1)
Millions of poor children suffer from chronic under-nutrition,
the under-consumption of essential nutrients and food energy. The risk of nutrient deficiencies that can lead to serious health
problems, including impaired cognitive development, growth failure, physical weakness, anemia and stunting. (2)
A survey of America’s Second Harvest national network of food banks in late 2001 and early 2002 found that 86% had
seen an increase in requests for food assistance during the past year. (3)
###
Nearly two-thirds of the United States
population is overweight.
Latest
Obesity Statistics
USA Obesity
Rates Reach Epidemic Proportions
- 58
Million Overweight; 40 Million Obese; 3 Million morbidly Obese
- Eight
out of 10 over 25's Overweight
- 78% of American's
not meeting basic activity level recommendations
- 25% completely
Sedentary
- 76% increase
in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 yrs old since 1990
http://www.annecollins.com/obesity/statistics-obesity.htm
·
The poorest 40 percent of the world’s
population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.Source
·
20% of the population in the developed nations, consume
86% of the world’s goods.
