Hunger

Nineteen million adults and twelve million children live in households that struggle to buy needed food, forcing them to live off nutritionally poor diets.
             As if those figures haven't proven enough, sources state that hunger in the US has grown an estimated fifty percent since 1985. While hunger decreased among children in the 1960's by forty-five percent, the number in poverty increased by about forty-seven percent between 1973-1992. In 1998, the hungry population consisted of sixty-two percent female, thirty-eight percent male, thirty-eight percent children (under age 18), of whom forty-seven percent are White, thirty-two percent are African American, and fifteen percent are Hispanic. These percentages are continuing to increase today. .
             Compared to the four percent of American households that were hungry in 1995, almost ten percent of households in the US were food insecure between 1996-1998, an increase of six percent in just one year. Over the past two decades, the poverty rate among working families in the US has increased by nearly fifty percent. Regionally, among the top states in net farm income (including California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas), the food-insecurity rate ranged from 6.9 percent to 12.9 percent.
             Hunger has been covered in great detail on the national level, but the real crisis lies in international, underdeveloped countries all over the globe. While evidence shows that hunger is being approached effectively around the world, there is still much more that needs to be provided. Eight hundred million people in the developing world, which accounts for twenty percent of the total population, are chronically undernourished. And yet this is striking evidence considering that since the mid-1970's, the world has produced enough food to provide everyone with a minimally adequate diet. The number of undernourished people in developing countries fell from 942 million in 1970 to 786 million in 1990 and from thirty-six percent to twenty percent of the population.