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11 World Hunger Statistics and Facts

Did you know that there are 925 million people every day in the world that experience hunger? This isn’t the type of hunger that one gets because they missed a meal or even two because of a busy day. This is the type of hunger where people don’t know where their next meal will come from. It’s being so hungry that you’d be willing to eat dirt rather than suffer from constant hunger pains.

The Spread of Hunger

More people around hungry every day globally than the populations of the United States, Canada, and Europe combined.

It is the developing nations that are hit the worst when it comes to the hunger problem. Because they lack access to real food resources, there just isn’t enough food to go around. In many of these countries, what food is available is either reserved for or controlled by the elite class of that nation, which further limits food access to the general population.

These Hunger Facts Are Sobering

1. 90% of people who live with hunger are chronically hungry, which means they never get enough to eat.
2. 98% of the world’s chronically hungry live in developing nations.
3. 25% of the children who grow up in the world’s developing nations grow up underweight because of the lack of food.

Takeaway: The world produces more calories than the entire population currently needs for a healthy diet, which means it is humanity’s fault that there are people who are chronically hungry. Because of that fact, there is a way that we all can take action to make sure that this problem with world hunger can be solved sooner rather than later.

World Hunger Isn’t Just in Developing Countries

1. 1 out of every 6 people in the United States goes hungry at some point during the week involuntarily, totaling 49 million people.
2. On a global scale, malnutrition that is caused by chronic hunger kills more people than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.
3. 1 child dies from hunger every 6 seconds in the world today. 1 million of these kids die because of a lack of Vitamin A and/or zinc in their diet.
4. 66% of the world’s hungry live in 7 primary nations, including India and China.
5. 1 out of every 3 American Caucasian children will receive food stamp assistance at some point in their lives. 90% of African-American children receive similar assistance.
6. In 1970, 126 members of the United Nations pledged to spend just 0.7% of their income on foreign aid to eliminate hunger. Only 5 countries today meet that figure annually.
7. The United States doesn’t spend on foreign aid, but it does lead the world in donations to combat world hunger by contributing more than $24 billion every year.
8. Almost all the hungry people, 780 million, live in developing countries, representing 12.9 percent, or one in eight, of the population of developing counties.

Takeaway: Hunger is a local problem, not just a global problem. Many often look overseas to fight hunger without realizing that their neighbor down the street doesn’t have enough eat. If 1 out of every 6 people is hungry, that means that there are 5 people who could donate just a fraction of what they have to help permanently eliminate hunger.

World Hunger Statistics

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