Help Fight Hunger Locally

The St. George area is one of 200 communities in the nation chosen to compete in Wal-Mart's second "Fighting Hunger Together" event.  $1 million will be awarded toward operating and other expenses for organizations that provide food and resources to fight hunger.  The Dixie Care and Share and the St. George Soup Kitchen may be among those recipients if St. George wins.  Right now we are behind a city in Texas.  The contest ends Monday evening and voting can be done each day.  So your help is needed big time!!!
Go on your facebook then to Wal-Mart then to:
1.   "Walmart: Fighting Hunger Together" facebook app
2.  Choose "Utah"
3.  Click "St. George, Ut Area"
4.  Click "Vote & Share"

So for all those families and children in our school district that can benefit from this program please take a second and vote each day.

World Hunger and Poverty by Anup Shah

We often hear about people’s desire to solve world hunger, or to be able to feed the world and help alleviate the suffering associated with it.
However, meaningful long-term alleviation to hunger is rooted in the alleviation of poverty, as poverty leads to hunger. World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty. If efforts are only directed at providing food, or improving food production or distribution, then the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency would still remain. And so while continuous effort, resources and energies are deployed to relieve hunger through these technical measures, the political causes require political solutions as well.

http://www.globalissues.org/issue/6/world-hunger-and-poverty

The World Hunger Problem: Facts and Statistics

• In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty"
• Every year 15 million children die of hunger
• For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years
• Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!
• The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.
• One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture
• The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world. Hunger in Global Economy
• Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. UNICEF
• 3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day.
• In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.
• In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.
• The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.
• One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
• Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.
• In 1997 alone, the lives of at least 300,000 young children were saved by vitamin A supplementation programmes in developing countries.
• Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
• About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age
• To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
• The assets of the world's three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
• Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger
• It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm

DoSomething.org- 11 Facts about Global Hunger

 

Do Something to Stop Hunger!

1. 925 million people worldwide suffer from hunger, that's more than the populations of the U.S., Canada and the European Union combined.
2. 90% of the world’s hungry live with chronic hunger, a nagging hunger that does not go away.
3. The direct medical cost of hunger and malnutrition is estimated at $30 billion each year.
4. A third of the world’s population is affected by vitamin and mineral deficiencies. These deficiencies compromise the immune system and can result in serious health problems.
5. More than 60% of chronically hungry people are women.
6. Hunger is often passed from mother to child. Each year, 17 million children are born underweight because their mothers are malnourished.
7. About 178 million children worldwide are short in stature or stunted because of lack of food, vitamin and mineral deficiencies and disease.
8. Malnutrition can also affect a child's intellectual development. Malnourished children often score significantly lower on math and language achievement tests than do well-nourished children.
9. More than 16,000 children die each day from hunger-related conditions.
10. Almost all of these deaths occur in developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia suffer from the highest rates of hunger and malnutrition.
11. The number of chronically hungry people worldwide grows by an average of four million people per year.

Sources:

World Heath Organization
World Food Program
Bread for the World

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http://www.dosomething.org/actnow/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-hunger-across-world

Food: A hungry world

Charities and development economists necessarily focus so much attention on hungry people that you might be forgiven for thinking this was a problem only and always getting bigger. Not so. The number of hungry people worldwide actually fell between 1969 and 1997; and it dropped sharply after the great food-price spike of 2008. Those are headline statistics, of course, but they show one thing: this is not an intractable problem.

It is, however, a resurgent one. An Oxfam report published yesterday forecasts that a billion people will go undernourished this year. It is not the only one to sound the alarm: last week the UN warned that spiralling food prices could well lead to riots, as happened in 30 countries three years ago. Then there is Christian Aid, which recently put out its own report on hunger, and the World Bank, which has talked more and more of late about food poverty. However alarming Oxfam's predictions this week about the future of food might be – that the average price of staples will more than double in the next couple of decades, hitting the world's poorest hardest – few of the other NGOs working in this field would sharply disagree with them. Nor would Oxfam's description of the food-supply system as "bust" be too controversial. Any system that produces enough food for the entire world and yet fails to feed one in seven people, which is subject to rampant speculation and land-grabbing, and where crops and land that could be used to feed people are instead turned into fuel for Hummers, is patently not working.

The question is what to do about it. Typically, the solutions divide into three. The first is to leave the market to sort it out: financiers and an open trading system will supposedly shunt more cash into agriculture. This may be the case over the long term, but this logic completely failed in 2008 and the resulting disaster cost human lives. Free-traders sometimes point to the export bans instituted by Egypt, Malawi and so many others as being the prime culprit of the price spiral, but they were really a response.
The second is at the opposite extreme, and consists of wailing about population growth. Yet it is not African villagers who are eating more than their fair share. The British eat 85kg of meat a year; in newly rich but often vegetarian India, that figure falls to 3kg. The problem is not population numbers but consumption, and here the west punches well above its weight.
Finally, there is an answer that lies in treating food security as a priority, rather than as a soft commodity to be traded like any other. Its production and trading should be much more heavily regulated, and protected.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/food-a-hungry-world-editorial

Hunger Stats from WFP

TOP 4 HUNGER STATS




MORE HUNGER STATS

• 925 million people do not have enough to eat  and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. (Source: FAO news release, 14 September 2010)
• Asia and the Pacific region is home to over half the world’s population and nearly two thirds of the world’s hungry people;
  (Source: FAO news release, 2010)
• Women make up a little over half of the world's population, but they account for over 60 percent of the world’s hungry.
  (Source:  Strengthening efforts to eradicate hunger..., ECOSOC, 2007)
• 65 percent  of the world's hungry live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.
  (Source: FAO news release, 2010)
  

• Undernutrition contributes to five million deaths of children under five each year in developing countries.
  (Source: Under five deaths by cause, UNICEF, 2006)
• One out of four children - roughly 146 million - in developing countries is underweight
  (Source: The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 2007)
• More than 70 percent of the world's underweight children (aged five or less) live in just 10 countries, with more than 50 per cent located in South Asia alone;
  (Source: Progress for Children: A Report Card on Nutrition, UNICEF, 2006)
• 10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths;
  (Source: The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 2007)
• Iron deficiency is the most prevalent form of malnutrition worldwide, affecting an estimated 2 billion people. Eradicating iron deficiency can improve national productivity levels by as much as 20 percent.
  (Source:  World Health Organization, WHO Global Database on Anaemia)
• Iodine deficiency is the greatest single cause of mental retardation and brain damage, affecting 1.9 billion people worldwide. It can easily be prevented by adding iodine to salt.
  (Source:  World Nutrition Situation 5th report ,UN Standing Committee on Nutrition2005)

Fighting Malnutrition to Save Lives

Famine crisis in Somalia

The Horn of Africa is experiencing the worst drought in 60 years. In Somalia, famine has been declared in multiple regions — areas where 10% of the children under five die every 3 months. Severe malnutrition rates are the reality in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, where thousands of families are arriving daily to escape violence and starvation in Somalia.
The current situation represents the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world today and Africa's worst food security crisis since Somalia's famine twenty years ago.

A silent killer

Somalia is not the only place where children are starving.
Malnutrition is the underlying cause of more than 1/3 of all childhood deaths. Prices for basic food like rice, maize, wheat, oil, sugar and salt are skyrocketing, forcing millions of the world's poorest children into severe malnourishment and starvation.
In much of the world, children with full bellies are still lacking the nutrients and vitamins they need to grow to their full potential.  A malnourished child is less able to fight off illness, less likely to get the most out of schooling, and often becomes physically and mentally stunted. Malnutrition keeps children trapped in the cycle of poverty.

You can help

UNICEF depends on the generosity of donors to support child nutrition. Whether through an emergency feeding program during a disaster or famine or an established community clinic offering education and support to young mothers, UNICEF is committed to preventing and treating child malnutrition around the globe, helping every child get the nutrition needed for a healthy and promising future.

Related Nutrition and Food Security Links

April 3, 2012

Racing to provide lifesaving supplies to one million children in the Sahel

Over 15 million people in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal are directly affected by the food and nutrition crisis ravaging through the Sahel region. UNICEF is launching a massive fundraising campaign to help the one million children in danger of dying from severe acute malnutrition. UNICEF estimates that it needs $120 million to provide children lifesaving treatment and protection from severe acute malnutrition. Only 32% of that need has been met so far.

March 5, 2012

Children in Chad face life-threatening malnutrition

Experts and government officials are calling attention to the emerging food crisis in West and Central Africa’s Sahel region. Due to failed rains and poor harvests most families in Chad, one of eight countries in Sahel, have been unable to grow enough or earn enough to feed themselves. With 62% of Chadians living below the international poverty line this has the makings of a life-threatening crisis for thousands of families, and for children in particular, who are most vulnerable to the devastating health complications linked to malnutrition.

February 26, 2012

Food shortages force children to drop out of school in Niger

Food insecurity caused by drought is interrupting the education of children in Niger. With not enough to eat, school is quickly becoming an afterthought for many Nigerien children. Lack of energy, displacement, and the search for food all play a role in keeping children from their educational development. The situation could become even more precarious. UNICEF is working with partners to provide emergency school feeding, construct classrooms for displaced children and expand school capacity in host communities, among other interventions.

Stop Hunger Now

Join the Fight Against Hunger

Stop Hunger Now is an international hunger relief organization that coordinates the distribution of food and other life-saving aid around the world. The organization is driven by a vision of a world without hunger and a mission to end hunger in our lifetime by providing food and life-saving aid to the world's most vulnerable and by creating a global commitment to mobilize the necessary resources.
Stop Hunger Now’s meal packaging program provides volunteers the opportunity to package dehydrated, high protein, and highly nutritious meals that are used in crisis situations and in school feeding programs for schools and orphanages in developing countries around the world.
In its efforts to respond to emergency needs around the world Stop Hunger Now receives and distributes significant donations of in-kind aid. These donations are large quantities of food, medicines, medical supplies and other such items as may be of use in fighting hunger and providing relief in a crisis.

Meal Packaging Event Highlights

Stop Hunger Now's meal packaging program is a fun, hands-on international mission project for everyone that encourages team building and provides the opportunity to have an exponential and sustainable international impact without leaving your home town.

Bread for the World

      Urging our nation's leaders to end hunger

 

About Hunger

 

In 2005, the latest year for which data are available, 1.4 billion people in developing countries lived in extreme poverty—on less than $1.25 a day—down from 1.9 billion in 1981.
In the United States, 14.5 percent of households struggle to put food on the table. More than one in four children is at risk of hunger.
We can end hunger in our time. Everyone, including government, must do their part.

By making our voices heard in Congress, we make our laws more fair and compassionate to people in need.

What We Do

 

Bread for the World is a collective Christian voice urging our nation's decision makers to end hunger at home and abroad.

Confronting the problem of hunger can seem overwhelming.
What can one person do? Plenty.
Bread for the World members write personal letters and emails and meet with our members of Congress.
Working through our churches, campuses, and other organizations, we engage more people in advocacy.
Each year, Bread for the World invites churches across the country to take up a nationwide Offering of Letters to Congress on an issue that is important to hungry and poor people.

How You Can Help

 

Food is a basic need, and it is unjust that so many people go without enough to eat.
Confronting the problem of hunger can seem overwhelming. What can one person do? Plenty—and Bread for the World can help.

Write to Congress

Everyone—including government—must do their part to end hunger. With the stroke of a pen, policies are made that redirect millions of dollars and affect millions of lives. Make your voices heard in Congress by speaking out for the needs of hungry and poor people.

ADRA: Alleviating Poverty and Hunger

Whether it is child poverty, famine in Africa or food shortages throughout the world, ADRA is working hard to eradicate poverty and hunger wherever it may be found.. Dedicated to far more than simply providing food to the hungry, ADRA seeks to equip people with the tools they need to not just survive - but to thrive.

Across the globe, ADRA’s food programs are establishing reliable, long-term food security and protecting those who are most vulnerable. Our food programs help the poor by providing emergency food aid when necessary, and seek to provide long-term solutions to hunger and famine.
In ADRA-assisted communities, farmers are given seeds and equipment, and are taught better methods to grow crops and irrigate their fields. Mothers are taught how to start vegetable gardens to feed their hungry children, and earn an income that can be used for medical needs or schooling.
Around the world, poverty threatens the wellbeing of families. Children are sometimes left without parents or a way to survive. When victims of child poverty end up on the streets, ADRA is there to provide food, shelter, education, and love..
Thanks to ADRA, individuals become self-sufficient and empowered, able to make a new beginning for themselves and finally realize their dreams.
We need your help. Your donation will change the lives of those who face daily hunger, starvation and poverty. Please prayerfully consider how much you can give to continue this vital work.