Personal Essay: What Causes World Hunger?



Personal Essay: What Causes World Hunger?

Introduction

To be healthy and active, we should consume sufficient quantities of quality and variety of foods. Children cannot reach their full potential and adults will have difficulty in maintaining and expanding their opportunities if they are not taking sufficient amount of food. Today about 800 million people are chronically malnourished and cannot get sufficient food to meet even minimum energy needs (Knight, 1998). Approximately 200 million children under five suffer from acute or chronic symptoms of malnutrition during the period of seasonal food shortages. During the drought and civil unrest these number increases. According to some estimates, malnutrition is an important factor in the death of nearly 13 million children under five who die each year from preventable diseases and infections such as measles, diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia, or combinations thereof.

Discussion

There are many factors that lead to hunger. Among them poverty is the major part that causes hunger (Smith, 1989). Also lack of education is one of the problems that inevitably is connected with that of poverty and hunger, and reaches its high points in the poorest parts of the world. Even today around the world 113 million children are not attending primary school, while 40 million do not reach to last grade of primary school. On the other hand, for the vast majority of people in poor countries, who live mostly in the country and is linked to agriculture or traditional subsistence pastoralists, the school does not make much sense because it serves to improve their lives every day. There are still many countries where more than 70% of the population is illiterate. Although population growth is a symptom of poverty and misery in which they are the countries of the South: the high birth rate does not cause poverty.

The problem of hunger and underdevelopment is primarily related to agricultural productivity and the lack of natural resources that even if there are not exploited or used badly and with no benefit to the people. It is particularly low, despite the vast expanses of land and the high percentage of agricultural population. From the first you will get poor harvests and irregular, which do not guarantee a constant supply throughout the year, partly because of ignorance of the techniques of conservation. Compounding the situation areas of subsistence agriculture often contributes to the lack of breeding animals for meat. Plantation agriculture, practiced in large companies operated by local landowners or corporations, are obtained almost always useless products to food of local populations: cotton, coffee, cocoa, tea, etc. are exported ... certainly not with economic benefits for indigenous peoples who are interested in these products only as seasonal agricultural workers and poorly paid.

The actual nutritional status of the population of the underdeveloped countries shows the incredible complexity of the Food of the problem. You can certainly talk about the food of theoretical capacity of the Earth, the doubling and tripling, even cultivated areas, the use of mankind to eat or chlorella cultivation of ...