Hunger in America
Mahatma Ghandi once said “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed”. He was correct; Earth has far more than enough to sustain all livings things, but humanity uses and takes such an excess to an extent where not even all of humanity has enough anymore let alone every other living being that needs Earth’s resources. Of all of the children hungry in the world, 78% live in countries with food surpluses. Even in the United States of America alone, there is enough money to end world hunger, but we haven’t even ended hunger in our own country. There are a great many people in the U.S. who can provide food to those who need it, yet the rate of hunger is extremely high.
According to the Borgen Project, the price to end world hunger is 30 billion in US dollars a year (Borgen Project). The US spent $737 billion USD on just our defense budget in 2012 alone (Borgen Project). In that single year, the US spent enough to feed every person in the world for the next 24 years. What is it we are defending ourselves from that we need to let fellow Americans go hungry, even though we are able to save them
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49.1 million people were food insecure, 15.8 million were children under the age of 18 (Hunger in America). Hunger and poverty are not the same thing; someone can be in poverty, without being hungry, and vice versa. However, they are related. Figure 1 below shows a relations between Unemployment - which usually leads to poverty - and hunger rates in a few states. The states shown in the Figure 1 have some of the highest rates of both hunger and unemployment (Feeding America). According to the statistics, States that have higher unemployment generally have higher hunger rates, and those with lower unemployment have lower hunger rates. Going by this, hunger rates could definitely decrease as employment increases, as families would have more money to buy