Keyword Sponsor Donor Program

“If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one.” - Mother Teresa

What is Hunger?
What is 'Food Security/Insecurity'?
What is 'Emergency Food Relief'?
What effects does hunger have on an individual and on the community?
What causes hunger?


What is Hunger?
Hunger can be broadly described but most notably relates to the experience of not having enough food to eat. This means that individual is not receiving the proper nutrients, ie. proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and fats, to provide for a healthy life. When an individual is undernourished they are consuming less than the required 2,100 calories to healthfully function both physically and mentally. Hunger is commonly classified into three categories: chronic, acute, seasonal and hidden hunger.

In the developing world, more than 800 million people who do not receive enough calories to meet the basic physical requirements for a healthy life. These are the most common images we see in the media, pictures of bloated, starving children living in inhospitable accommodations. They are the chronically hungry. Living on less than a dollar a day, they are victims of a vicious cycle of poverty that pervades their local and national economies.

While chronic hunger is the result of continuous poverty, acute hunger typically arises suddenly, usually from natural disasters, armed conflict or major disruptions in the food market. These types of humanitarian crises get more media coverage every year than cases of chronic hunger, but only an average of eight percent of those affected by acute hunger die from these crises.

Seasonal hunger is directly related to the cycles of food production and harvesting. Food shortages may be caused by poor harvests or the inability for a family to produce enough food to get them through to the next harvest.

But there are also the hidden hungry, an additional 1.2 billion people who suffer from chronic vitamin and mineral deficiencies. These people actually get enough calories to survive from day to day, and so they are not considered to be starving. They do not show the same physical symptoms as the chronically hungry, but the lack of sufficient nutrients has a debilitating impact on their health and quality of life.

Malnutrition is another concept relating to hunger. It is defined in medical terms and is the condition of resulting from the inadequate consumption of nutrients, which impairs mental and physical health and increases susceptibility to disease. An individual suffering from malnutrition is unable to maintain natural bodily processes such as pregnancy, physical labor, growth, etc. Malnutrition is measured in physical terms, such as weight, height and age, as opposed to the amount of food a person eats. Iron deficiency is the most common form of malnutrition, affecting approximately 2 billion people.

What is 'Food Security/Insecurity'?
Food insecurity is the uncertain availability of nutritional food. Individuals may have to cut back on meals or portions and/or may not know where they will obtain their next meal.

Food security, on the other hand, is the certainty that an individual will have the appropriate food available to sustain a healthy life and will be able to acquire it in a socially acceptable manner.

As of November 2006, the term 'food insecurity' officially replaced 'hunger' in all USDA sanctioned reports. The decision was based, purportedly, on the immeasurable nature of the term hunger. The Conscious Alliance will continue to use the term 'hunger' because we believe that hunger needs to remain highly visible in the public sector if we are going to ever effectively address it.

What is 'Emergency Food Relief'?
This is the service of providing food to individuals and households that have no other sources for food. Often times low-income families and elders will have periods of time in the month, such as the end of the month when they have run out of money, and have no means of putting food on their table. This is when they will often turn to food banks to get them through these times. Emergency food relief also relates to times of crisis, such as natural disasters, when traditional avenues for securing food are unavailable.

What effects does hunger have on an individual and on the community?
Undernourishment negatively impacts an individual's health, productivity, and sense of well-being. A shortage of food also makes people more vulnerable to sickness, infection and disease, particularly in children. Common illnesses such as diarrhea can become life threatening. Stunted growth, slow mental processing, significantly reduced energy levels, and mental retardation are also common effects that have long-term consequences on an individual and their community. As chronic hunger reduces productivity, the ability for an individual, their community and ultimately their economy to move beyond their hunger becomes exponentially more difficult. Days are spent attempting to acquire enough food, not learning new job skills or exploring more successful methods of food production. This cycle is self-perpetuating, trapping whole communities in a continual plight.

For hungry families, children also become additional hands and are expected to work support the family, rather than attend school, where they may learn new skills to advance their position in the workforce.

What causes hunger?
Poor policy-making has prevented many developing countries from overcoming widespread hunger. The governments will often focus development on urban development rather than emphasizing key infrastructure critical to the enhancement of local food production. Major manufacturing facilities may be built instead of roads, energy plants, wells, irrigation ditches and warehouses. As a result, rural communities, whose populations make of the largest percentage of developing countries, remain disconnected from the urban business centers and without the appropriate resources to provide their own sources of food. Their food too expensive to transport to distant markets, their water supplies unreliable, and lacking any facilities to store their product, these people remain trapped in poverty.

Civil wars and political instability displace millions from their homes, cutting them off from their typical lines of food acquisition. Additionally, an enemy may prevent food from reaching segments of the population as a means for securing their ultimate submission.

Natural disasters and long draughts, which are the most common cause for food shortages in the world, are increasingly becoming more and more threatening to the food security of developing nations. Climate change is also making bad environmental situations even worse.

Coinciding many of these issues are also the erosion, soil exhaustion, and water contamination resulting from decades of deforestation, overgrazing and over cropping.

Women are disproportionately represented amongst the world's hungry, comprising 70 percent of the total. As a result of gender discrimination, women have unequal social, economic and political opportunities. When they are able to work paying jobs they are typically paid significantly less than men. Yet, most international food relief programs target women to distribute food to communities because the food is more evenly distributed compared to when men are responsible for the distribution.