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40-Hour Famine: Eyes Wide Open (VIDEO)

By the Web Editors
Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
A starving 2-year-old girl is comforted by her mother at a refugee camp in in Mogadishu, Somalia. Photo by John Moore/Getty.
Jul 14, 2012
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Every day, millions of children go hungry. But it doesn't have to be that way.

  • Hunger is the world's No. 1 health risk, causing more deaths annually worldwide than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
    (Source: World Food Program)
  • One in seven people in the world will go to bed hungry tonite.
    (Source: World Food Program)
  • There are more hungry people in the world (925 million) than the combined population of the United States, Canada and the European Union (841 million)
    (Source: World Food Program)
  • 925 million people do not have enough to eat  and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. (Source: FAO news release, 14 September 2010)
  • 65 percent  of the world's hungry live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia. 
    (Source: FAO news release, 2010)
  • Undernutrition contributes to 5 million deaths of children under age five each year in developing countries.
    (Source: Under five deaths by cause, UNICEF, 2006)
  • One out of four children — roughly 146 million — in developing countries is underweight
    (Source: The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 2007)
  • 10.9 million children under age five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths;
    (Source: The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 2007)
  • Iron deficiency is the most prevalent form of malnutrition worldwide, affecting an estimated 2 billion people. Eradicating iron deficiency can improve national productivity levels by as much as 20 percent.
    (Source:  World Health Organization, WHO Global Database on Anaemia

 

Find out about the causes of hunger — and the solutions — in the video below from World Vision Australia (with music by Gotye.)

http://youtu.be/J-ZXmrVGkDw

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A starving 2-year-old girl is comforted by her mother at a refugee camp in in Mogadishu, Somalia. Photo by John Moore/Getty.
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