A billion hungry people is a big, ugly, scary statistic too!

by Adam Valvasori - Values Manager

Image via: Worldmapper: "Undernourishment in 2000" The territory size shows the proportion of all undernourished people worldwide, that live there.

On the news this morning I caught myself being quite worried about a statistic. According to the United Nations:

Up to 51 million jobs worldwide could disappear by the end of this year as a result of the economic slowdown that has turned into a global employment crisis.

That's a lot! Upon reflection, the reason I'm disturbed is simple: I, or someone I love could lose their job. Is this the reason why the other statistic coming out of the UN this week isn't having much of an impact and thus not receiving as much media attention? Even though it is clearly a bigger, uglier and scarier one.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that by the end of 2008, rising prices had added 109 million to the ranks of the hungry. Today, about one in six of the world’s population goes short of food, almost a billion people.

Almost a billion people are going hungry and millions more could slip over the edge unless the world takes urgent action, according to aid agency Oxfam. A grim reality for one in every six people living on this planet and yet, the majority of us don't even bat an eye lid.

We don't know how lucky we are.

We may lose our jobs but we'll never go hungry.

We will never know the pain or slow, excruciating death of starvation.

We don't know how lucky we are and ignorance is bliss.

But it doesn't have to be this way... It starts with becoming better informed about our shared reality. Here are some facts and figures from Oxfam that should concern us all:

• One in six of the world's population is hungry
  
• Between 50 and 60 percent of childhood deaths in the developing world are hunger related
  
• The risk of death is 2.5 times higher for children with mild malnutrition than for children who are adequately nourished
  
• The proportion of overseas development assistance spent on agriculture has fallen from almost a fifth in 1980 to 3 percent today
  
• Poor people are particularly vulnerable to food price changes with many spending up to 80 percent of their income on food
  
• Even before the recent crisis 16,000 children died every day of hunger-related causes - one every five seconds

Read More: A Billion Hungry People
Do More: Donate to an International Aid and Development agency that is helping to address the short and long term causes of the food crisis. Something quick and easy you can do is buy a snag for change...

The Body Shop shouted me this snag at Snags for Change World Vision's Global Food Crisis Emergency Appeal. Buy a snag. Make a difference.