Forty million people in the US, including 12.5 million children, are food insecure. Globally, 821 million people are chronically hungry. This tragedy is not because of a shortage of food, it is because of persistent poverty and governments’ unwillingness to address the problem in a meaningful way. Fortunately, people are working for both immediate and long-term change in the US and around the world.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines food security as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.” 9
Today, food insecurity is not only associated with hunger; somewhat paradoxically, it often correlates with obesity as well. This does not mean that the two are necessarily causally linked. Both food insecurity and obesity are the consequences of poverty and a lack of access to nutritious food. Low-income neighborhoods often lack grocery stores or other markets that carry a wide range of healthy foods and instead have a high prevalence of convenience stores and fast food restaurants. People living in poverty are less likely to have reliable transportation for shopping. Healthy foods tend to be more expensive than highly processed foods that are filling but have low nutritional value. As an added obstacle, when fresh produce is available in low-income areas, it is often of poor quality, making it less appealing to purchase.
Opportunities for physical activity can be limited in low-income communities, which often lack parks, playgrounds or even sidewalks, and the stress of the financial and emotional pressures of poverty has been linked to obesity. 11
Individuals become food insecure for any number of complex reasons, but the root cause is nearly always poverty. Environmental crises and a wide variety of political factors also contribute to hunger and food insecurity in the US and around the world.
Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks and other emergency food providers, reports that 72 percent of the households it served in 2014 lived at or below the federal poverty level, with a median annual household income of $9,175. 16
In the US, people have lost their homes, crops and livelihoods and have been displaced from their communities by hurricanes, floods and wildfires that are more frequent and more devastating as a result of a changing climate. 18 Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen, who witnessed a similar Indian famine in 1943 as a child, succinctly summarized the problem in his case study of that famine: “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” 20
Somewhat similarly, the primary crops grown in the US are no longer food crops but are commodity grains used to feed animals or converted to ethanol or food additives. US farm policy supports the production of a steady stream of these crops to benefit corporate agribusiness, not the production of healthy, affordable food for people. This policy encourages vast overproduction, and, to find a market for the excess, we ship commodities abroad. US grain exporters sell US crops to other countries for less than they cost to produce in those other countries (a practice called “dumping”), which undercuts the local agricultural economy and drives small farmers into poverty and hunger. 23 Food insecurity was a major factor that touched off the Arab Spring rebellions of 2010-2011. 303137
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