Every day an estimated 24,000 people die from hunger or hunger related causes. Three-fourths of these deaths are children under the age of five. One may wonder how this can be living in a country were it seems so much food is wasted everyday. Food restaurants and grocery stores throw away food every night before closing. Many Americans waste food every day within their own homes. With so much "left over" food in American how is it that an estimated 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition? Well, first we must define the word hunger. Hunger, in this case, is not just the rumbling in ones stomach that most of us feel if we have not eaten for a few hours. For this purpose, hunger is defined as "a condition resulting from chronic under-consumption of food and/or nutritious food products. It may be precipitated by an inability to obtain sufficient quantities of food to eat or a failure to consume adequate quantities of nutritious food products, regardless of the ability to obtain sufficient food supplies." The problem of world hunger is not that there is not enough food produced in the world. "World production of grain alone is over 1.5 billion tons, enough to supply the entire world population with two pounds a day." This grain combined the current production of other foods such as meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts is enough to provide each adult and child on earth 3000 calories a day which is what the average American consumes. Americans are not the only ones who waste food. People all over the world are doing the very same thing. And the though it seems that America has too much food, we Americans have hungry people living right here in our own country. The world hunger problem lies within the changing environmental conditions, population, and most of all, poverty. This paper will discuss the causes, effects and possible solutions of world hunger. There are three major causes of world hunger, changing environment conditions, population, and poverty.
