There are two major factors contributing into development of world hunger, which should by no means be neglected. These factors are rural poverty and areas of conflict. Certainly, human kind have been attempting to undertake measures to put an end to the world hunger and to reduce poverty, as well as once and for all resolve armed conflicts. However, this initiative has not been very successful so far. And each time there have been numerous underlying factors, which determined the failure. Rural poverty can be reduced, but it is hard to arrange the circumstances, at which this problem would be entirely resolved. The point is that poverty oftentimes is rooted in lack of knowledge of rural population regarding the ways in which they can invest their effort and available resources into their own well-being. Thus, it is reasonable to seek a resolution to this problem through educating rural population. This measure is, however, insufficient since education is only effective when there is proper motivation to deepen one’s knowledge, which is oftentimes not the case. In many instances the situation is even more complicated due to massive substance abuse, due to inherited factors and a lot of other reasons, which cannot be addressed collectively. Education with provided reasonable level of motivation can certainly take care of a significant part of the problem; meanwhile the problem cannot be fully resolved. Once it is not resolved, there will remain enough space for “initiating” new members of the “poverty club”. Thus, there will always be new blood in this stream.
Similarly, it is idealistic to expect full resolution of the armed conflicts problem. There have always been and will always remain people, whose financial and political interests lie within the field of armed conflict. The reasons behind it are numerous: weapon trade, imperialistic ambitions, areas of influence and control over them and so on. Thus, the problem of armed conflicts will always remain, unlike something unpredictable happens and resolves it once and for all, and thus it will remain to be a contributing factor into world hunger.
This explains, among other things, why there still exist pockets of hunger even in industrialized countries, not even mentioning developing nations and third world countries. There are areas, where the set of factors, which underlie hunger are much more influential, compared to the measures taken in order to resolve the issue… For instance, a number of additional factors may easily bring a family to face the problem of hunger. People, who live in areas with high unemployment rate, are at higher risk of experiencing hunger (Borger et al, 2004). Even a birth of another child can bring a family below the poverty level (Ratcliffe, 2011), and, as a result, cause it to experience hunger.
Environmental factors are also among the causes of hunger. The quality of water all over the world is reducing; the access of people to high quality soils also drops. For a person it is becoming more and more complicated to survive depending solely on subsistence farming is nearly impossible, less and less can be found in the woods, the number of which is decreased due to the activity of humans. As the outcome, more and more people find themselves below poverty level, while the fruitful soils are becoming subject to armed conflicts.
Thus, even though world community has set an ambitious goal of putting end to poverty and hunger by 2030 and it is certainly a good goal to work towards, however it is important to remain realistic and realize that however beautiful, this goal is unachievable. We only may thrive to reduce poverty and hunger, but it is important to realize, that they will always co-exist with human kind, and thus we need to keep working hard in order to further reduce them.
- Borger, C., Gearing, M., Macaluso, T., Mills, G., Montaquila, J., Weinfield, N., & Zedlewski, S. (2014). Hunger in America 2014 Executive Summary. Feeding America.
- Ratcliffe, Caroline (2011). “How Much Does the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Reduce Food Insecurity? » American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 93 (4): 1082–1098.
