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World Hunger Essay

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World hunger has been a constant problem throughout the ages. It is a problem that should be able to be solved easily, yet there are still 1.02 billion undernourished people worldwide. With the world population being 6.7 billion people, and the Earth producing more than enough food for this amount of people, why is it that there are hungry, malnourished people all around the globe? Hunger is caused by many events, including the poverty trap, natural disasters, war, poor agricultural infrastructure, and over-exploitation of the environment. The poverty trap is the cycle of poverty that can begin from a limited diet and progress to birthing a baby that is malnourished. This causes the baby to have slower development and poor …show more content…

They do this by destroying local markets and seizing or destroying crops and animals, while contaminating wells and mining fields. This forces farmers to leave their lands and usually begins their cycle in the poverty trap. Poor agricultural infrastructure causes hunger because the lack of roads, warehouses, and irrigation causes higher transportation costs, a deficiency of storage facilities, and unreliable water supplies. To improve the agricultural infrastructure, however, it would cost a profuse amount of money, which would put the country in greater debt and result in less funding for essential systems, such as health care, which already has too little funding. Over-exploitation of the environment is caused by deforestation, over-cropping, poor farming practices, and overgrazing. When over-exploitation occurs, salination, erosion, and desertification results, causing less fertility and more hunger across the globe. Salination is caused by erosion that strips the earth of its nutrients, leaving behind salty, unfertile land. This causes plants to have less of a chance of growing properly, or not grow at all. When less plants grow, less people are fed, and more go hungry. From 1970 to 1997, humanity was solving the starvation problem worldwide. The amount of hungry people had dropped from 959 million to 791 million, which is a total decrease of 168 million people. This decrease is

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