Feeding the Hungry

By: Antion Williams-Brown

Companies and groups all over the world try to help the hungry. You have things like small donations boxes at restaurants or fast-food places, and then you have larger non-profit organizations that are almost solely made to help the hungry. There is a lot that is done to try to stop the problem of people going hungry in the world. But with all that is being done there is still so much more that is needed to solve the problem. Some even say that the problem will never truly be solved. Personally, I think it is possible to solve the problem, the hardest part would be trying to reach everyone across the world. But it is worth trying even in a small scale, like donating to your local food bank.

Some larger companies all have been working to feed the hungry across the globe. You have companies like NorthStar, a moving company that has a large-scale food bank every year. This year they raised $47,000 for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. This gave meals to almost 200,000 hungry people in Los Angeles County. This is amazing but it only affects a small portion of the people that go hungry every day. Incredibly across the world about 821 million people go to bed hungry every night. That is a shocking one to nine ratio, and that could have even gone up now that the COVID pandemic has come and caused so many people to lose their jobs. Back in 2015 the global community adopted the 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development to help improve the lives of people by 2030. This group pledged to end world hunger, and so far, they are succeeding in lowering the problem. Since 1990 there are about 200 million fewer people that go hungry every night. This is good considering that the population has gone up by 1.9 billion since then. There are still a lot of problems facing feeding the hungry across the world.

There are a bunch of factors that make it challenging to feed the world. There are things like population growth. The amount of people in the world is a challenge alone. There is also the problem of food being wasted. According to researchers enough food exists to feed 10 billion people a day, but it is not distributed well and much of the food gets wasted. There is also a factor of what people are eating, farming produce and cattle can be done on a large scale. But not all people and groups eat the same thing making it hard to organize large quantities of food for mass production when it will not get used across the globe. There is another problem being drinkable water. Research shows that drinkable water is being used in such an abundance that it could lead to a possible lack in drinkable water in the future. Climate change can also effect crop growth making it harder to farm produce, it is found that climate change is decreasing crop yield by about 10%. These are just a few of the many problems facing the world today when dealing with the hunger problem.

There are a lot of factors to consider when feeding the hungry. A lot is being done across the world, but the problem is still at large. With one in every nine people going hungry every day something needs to be done. I encourage anyone who has the chance to donate some food to a food pantry or donate money to help the hungry. Although the solution seems so far out of reach, helping at least give food to one person is still progress towards the goal.

Resources

Feeding the Developing World: Six Major Challenges. Retrieved October 5, 2020, from https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/feeding-the-developing-world-six-major-challenges/

NorthStar Moving’s Annual Food Drive Provides Over 188,000 Meals to Feed Hungry Kids. (2020, September 24). Retrieved October 5, 2020, from https://news.yahoo.com/northstar-moving-annual-food-drive-130000291.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEVbsf6WhkBBOfL6eDaZnPpTVG9whjlBeWDI75zDMtB1Mnvm-YAD04kHBNtPVmSaj7ExE83-_FDTG9Vn72Gdje66Ku8rDEdovFmYiW06Z-Tm-GSLh8GIiDRF45aERxK1iWAfl5QJGAmfyxyJh8RVE6BY6m-Iq_x-1jednBrxDB6L