The World Food Day is marked by the United States on 16 October in honour of the date in 1945 when the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations was founded.
The theme for 2014 Food Day focuses on how family farming helps to eradicate world hunger: "Feeding the world, Caring for the Earth".
On this occasion, let us have a look at eight heart-wrenching facts about world hunger, retrieved via different sources:
- According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation report cited by NDTV, one of the largest populations of the undernourished can be found in Southern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Asian countries like Burundi, Eritrea and Comoros.
- The Global Hunger Index 2014 claims that Iraq, Comoros, Burundi and Swaziland have seen a constant escalating trend in their global hunger index since 1990, the channel adds.
- About 842 million people in the world do not eat enough to be healthy. That means one in every eight people on the planet goes to bed hungry each night, the World Food Program notes.
- A third of all deaths in children under the age of five in developing countries are linked to under-nutrition, a 2011 report by the UN Inter-agency Group for child mortality estimation claims.
- In a developing world, one child in four is stunted, which implies that their physical and mental growth is impaired because of inadequate nutrition, a report from the Lancet says.
- If women farmers had the same access to resources as men, the number of hungry in the world can be reduced by up to 150 million, according to a FOA report.
- According to World Food Program, it costs just US $0.25 per day to provide a child with all of the vitamins and nutrients he or she needs to grow up healthy.
- By 2050, climate change and erratic weather patterns could have push another 24 million children into hunger. And half of these children would be in Sub-Saharan Africa, claims a 2009 report by International Food Policy Research Institute.
Here are Five Quotes about Food and Hunger:
- "There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." – Mahatma Gandhi
- "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it world be a merrier world." – J.R.R. Tolkien, English author.
- "After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations." – Oscar Wilde, Irish writer and poet.
- "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." – Virginia Woolf, English Writer, A Room of One's own
- "There is no love sincerer than the love of food." – George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and co-founder of the London School of Economics.