The Issues: Poverty and Hunger

 

sustainable TableUntil recently, the philosophy about rural development was driven by the thought that creating a high-yielding means of producing export crops would increase the income in a community and bring them out of poverty. In many instances this has failed, and now the paradigm is shifting. The new development philosophy helps those in poverty help themselves. In both rural and urban areas, individuals are being encouraged (or taking it upon themselves) to take control of their own food security. Urban communities are reclaiming brown-fields and, using sustainable agricultural techniques, are providing their communities with healthful, fresh food while creating small businesses around selling these products to their communities. Rural areas are utilizing the ideals of sustainable agriculture to rebuild lost local production and distribution systems to provide food to their communities and nearby urban areas. All of these measures are being put in place to create a sustainable and equitable food system, in contrast to the detrimental and unbalanced industrial system.

Hunger, Industrial Agriculture, and the Global Food System
While at its root the cause of hunger is poverty, how and why individuals experience hunger is closely tied to the current system of industrial agricultural production and the globalized system of food distribution.

In developing nations, hunger and poverty are often the result of the general instability of a nation—politically, economically, and/or ecologically. People may not have access to land to grow food because they are refugees from war or may have limited access to water for irrigation because governments have limited funds and cannot afford to build the facilities to bring water to arid regions. These instabilities all together can lead to a crisis of hunger, a famine, which occurs when the number of people living in an area (consumption) exceeds the capacity of an area to produce sufficient amounts of food (production) for them. A crop failure due to disease or drought in a nation where the government is busy with war or has limited funding can tip the gentle balance of production and consumption and cause a mass situation of hunger.

In modern times, famine occurs in areas where food resources are scarce to begin with, illustrating a more subtle face of hunger: poverty and hunger can occur as frequently in rural areas as in urban areas. In some developing nations, as a result of efforts to industrialize agriculture and produce commodity crops for export, year after year farmers suffer from increasing debt due to the dependency of this type of agriculture on inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides. When the global price of inputs is high and the market price for their product is low, farmers can't sell their crops for enough money to cover the expensive inputs they use, so they end up with no money and nothing to eat.1 (Commodity crops are usually grains like corn and wheat that are sold wholesale to major distributors and could even be inedible for humans, if the crop was meant for animal feed).

Hunger is not only a problem of poorer or developing nations. The current industrialized system of food production and distribution also results in hunger and food insecurity2 in the United States. While the availability of food in the U.S. is seemingly endless, because the food system is driven by profit and efficiency, the impoverished in both rural and urban communities can find themselves without access to healthful, affordable food. In some instances, people are simply not able to purchase healthful food because their funds are limited. In the cities, supermarkets leave the poorer communities for the more profitable, affluent suburbs, leaving whole communities no choice but to shop at smaller stores with an inferior product and little by way of fresh food. These stores also tend to be more expensive, causing people living in the poorer areas of the country to pay more money for less nutritious food than those living in the more affluent areas.

Community Food Security: the Response to the Inequities of the Food System
There is a strong movement in the United States to shift the current food system to one that is more economically and socially just and environmentally sound. The philosophy of Community Food Security envisions a state where "all community residents obtain a safe, culturally appropriate, nutritionally sound diet through an economically and environmentally sustainable food system that promotes community self-reliance and social justice."3 In rural, urban and suburban communities, organizations and individuals are acting to generate community food security by increasing community access to fresh, healthful food, linking rural and urban communities with direct farm-to-city marketing efforts, and reorganizing the food system to benefit whole communities rather than giant food corporations.

Hunger and Poverty: A Current Look
As a response to the state of hunger in the world, the UN set forth the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger as the number one goal of the Millennium Development Goals. In relative terms, this would mean halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day. The latest UN report confirms a significant reduction in poverty and a reduction in the number of people suffering from chronic hunger in the world since 1990. However, there are still approximately 850 million people suffering from chronic hunger and the numbers change as the political, economic, and climate's stability changes. For more information about how to get involved in hunger issues internationally, visit World Hunger Year's "International Hunger and Government Food Programs" pages.

The United States—one of the wealthiest nations in the world—is a part of a globalized food system that has made access to food seemingly unending. Yet, even in this state of abundance, in 2006, 35.5 million people experienced hunger or food insecurity4. Many of these individuals are the working poor in America: individuals that work full-time at minimum wage jobs and try to support themselves and their families, but find themselves having to choose between paying bills and purchasing food. While the government does provide some assistance to these individuals through feeding programs such as the School Lunch Program and Food Stamps, these programs are not enough to meet the peoples' needs. In the 1980's the need was so great that private efforts like soup kitchens and food pantries attempted to fill in the gaps. These emergency food streams were intended to be a temporary solution while the ongoing issue of poverty was addressed, but they have now become a permanent fixture within the food system. Millions of people now depend on this uncertain system for obtaining food, which further exacerbates the inequities of the food system. Although soup kitchens and food pantries provide those who are food insecure access to adequate calories, the food provided through these emergency means is usually of substandard quality and of limited nutritive value. (It is often highly processed junk food which is no longer fit for the grocery stores.)

Community Food Security: Encouraging Self-Reliance and Grassroots Solutions
Soup kitchens and food pantries provide temporary relief to those who experience uncertain access to food, but they are not a long term solution to the hunger problem experienced in the United States. A long term vision of food security requires a living wage (not a minimum wage), strengthened and stable support for federal food programs and other basic benefits (such as health care), access to nutritious foods for everyone, and the re-establishment of self-reliant communities across America. The idea of community food security focuses on the entire food system, realizing that the current system of industrial, profit and efficiency driven agriculture and distribution cannot serve the needs of all Americans.

Several efforts have taken the ideals of community food security and attempted to recreate or reorganize the current food system. Urban agriculture (community garden) projects provide high quality food to the hungry, create green space in improvised areas of the city, and teach individuals about food production, marketing, distribution, as well as cooking and nutrition. Farmers markets link urban consumers to their rural food providers, allowing not only the exchange of money for food, but also understanding about the production of the food and the assurance that it is safe and of high quality. Farmer's markets, since they can be set up outdoors, also bring good quality, fresh fruits and vegetables into a community that may be lacking a supermarket or other outlet. These and other direct marketing initiatives can prevent the loss of farmland and the erosion of the rural economies—which also often suffer from poverty and hunger.

In symphony and as a result of these grassroots community food security initiatives, many cities, counties and states have been developing food policy councils as a way to study the current food system and initiate policy and action to improve it. A food policy council brings together stakeholders from all facets of a food system—it can include land-use planning organizations, for profit food enterprises, farmers, city or state officials, and/or any other individual or organization that has a role in the food system.

The Future is Now
There are many individuals and organizations across the nation who—with innovation and hard work—are creating community food security in their neighborhoods. Here is one example:

Growing Power is a nationwide nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environments they inhabit. It runs a Community Food Center in Milwaukee (which consists of seven large greenhouses, a kitchen, indoor and outdoor training gardens, an aquaculture system and food distribution facility, as well as rabbits, goats, chickens, and ducks) and offers workshops in aquaculture, aquaponics, vermiculture, horticulture, small and large-scale composting, soil reclamation, food distribution, beekeeping, and marketing. Growing Power also runs a Market Basket program, which teaches local organizations about nutrition, increases access to affordable food for city residents, and provides a market for urban agriculture and rural farmers. The program provides 100 food baskets a week to 35 different sites (including schools) in the Milwaukee area and over 400 baskets a month to Wisconsin residents.

Growing Power's collaborative projects focus on developing greater food access, building self-reliance, and job training for residents in the Milwaukee and Chicago areas. These efforts include transforming inner-city brownfield lots into cut flower gardens; linking gardening with healthy eating and exercise; assisting the organization of a group of homeless men in the development of a farm; establishing a Traditional West African Market Garden to encourage, train, and eventually sell organic herbal home remedies; and developing cafe and community food center.

What You Can Do

  • Volunteering at a soup kitchen or food pantry in your community is a great introduction the faces of hunger and the problems they encounter. Your help there is greatly needed and will be appreciated, and it will serve as a foundation from where you can begin to address the problem.
  • If you want to get more involved in the solution, your specific skills and interests would likely be of great value to the efforts to create a more food secure America. Whether you want to volunteer for (or start!) a food policy council, grow vegetables in a community garden, or reorganize the food distribution system in your community, or continue to volunteer at a soup kitchen, the World Hunger Year website is the perfect place to start. Visit their Food Security Learning Center, choose a topic, click "Take Action!" and start reading!

Did You Know?
This section is from World Hunger Year's "Just the Facts". Please visit their site for footnotes and further information. (Accessed September 2008. Used by permission.)

Domestic Hunger & Poverty Facts

  • From 1956 to 1981, the minimum wage was approximately half of the average American workers wage; today it is about 30%.
  • In the 1960s and 70s, a full-time worker earning minimum wage could support a family of three at the poverty level.
  • Housing costs continue to squeeze the budgets of low-income families. The typical household in poverty paid 64% of its income for housing in 2003, up from 61% in 1997.
  • A worker earning minimum wage would have to work 97 hours a week to pay the rent of an average two-bedroom apartment.
  • Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2001, 26.4% of female-headed families were poor, while 13.1% of male-headed families and 4.9% of married couple's households lived in poverty. In 2001, both black and Hispanic female-headed families had poverty rates exceeding 35%.
  • The U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that in 2004, requests for emergency food assistance increased an average of 13%. The study also found that 56% of those requesting emergency food assistance were employed. High housing costs, low-paying jobs, unemployment, and the economic downturn led the list of reasons contributing to the rise.

International Facts on Hunger and Poverty

  • Approximately 5 billion people live in the developing world. This world is made up of about 125 low and middle-income countries in which people generally have a lower standard of living with access to fewer goods and services than people in high-income countries.
  • Economically, the constant securing of food consumes valuable time and energy of poor people, allowing less time for work and earning income.
  • Across the world, 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 3 billion live on less than two dollars a day.
  • Providing universal access to basic social services and transfers to alleviate income poverty would cost $80 billion, less than the net worth of the seven richest men in the world.5

Page last updated September 2009

Many thanks to World Hunger Year and its Food Security Learning Center. For more information and many more interesting topics, please visit www.worldhungeryear.org.

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