The World We’ve Made: Every 5 Seconds A Child Dies From Malnutrition And Hunger

The World We’ve Made: Every 5 Seconds A Child Dies From Malnutrition And Hunger

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.” – Norman Borlaug, agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate. In a previous post, Agriculture In The 21st Century, the amount of food produced in the world that is wasted (1/3 of food produced) was brought up. In that post, a number of experts were quoted, stating that malnutrition and hunger could be ended if unused food were properly distributed. Malnutrition and Hunger The following statistics from the World Food Programme show the severity of the lack of food distribution in the world, chiefly highlighting its affect on the children of the world: Every five seconds a child dies because of hunger. 854 million people worldwide do not have enough to eat, more than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union. Hunger is the world’s no.1 health risk. It kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. One in seven people in the world will go to bed hungry tonight. Asia and the Pacific region is home to over half the world’s population and nearly two thirds of the world’s hungry people. 65 percent  of the world’s hungry live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia. Undernutrition contributes to five million deaths of children under five each year in developing countries. One out of four children – roughly 146 million – in developing countries is underweight. More than...
Global Youth Unemployment On The Rise

Global Youth Unemployment On The Rise

The current, unprecedented level of global youth unemployment has raised the risk of creating ‘a lost generation’… [Y]oung people account for 40 percent or more of all unemployed people in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia, and nearly 60 percent in Syria and Egypt.” Nemat Shafik, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. The world is facing a worsening youth employment crisis: young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults…” The International Labour Organization The United Nations estimates that last year 74.8 million youth between the ages of 15 to 24 faced joblessness, with 6.4 million young people dropping out of the labor market in 2011 alone. The highest youth unemployment rates are in North Africa (27.1%) and the Middle East (26.2%)… In the ostensibly prosperous Euro-area countries, over one-in-five young people (21.3%) cannot find a job. When this regionally-averaged figure is broken down to remove countries like Germany, the results are stark: In Spain and Greece, nearly half of all youth are without a job (48.7% and 47.2% …” CNN The Consequences Of Youth Unemployment Lower life expectancy: Unemployment more generally has been linked to lower life expectancy, a higher incidence of heart attacks later in life, and even higher rates of suicide. Higher crime rates: Increased unemployment has been linked to higher crime rates. Increased costs to the economy: Youth unemployment results in higher unemployment insurance and other benefit payments, lost income tax revenues, and wasted productive capacity. Lower lifetime earnings: Youth unemployment leaves a “wage scar” in the form of lower earnings that can last into middle age. The longer the period...
Agriculture In The 21st Century: The Need For Global Partnership To Address Poor Food Distribution, Waste, Malnutrition And Famine Worldwide

Agriculture In The 21st Century: The Need For Global Partnership To Address Poor Food Distribution, Waste, Malnutrition And Famine Worldwide

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase.” – World Hunger Education Service. Rising food prices are at a dangerous level, and global cooperation is needed to tackle the increasingly challenging issue.” – Robert B. Zoellick,  World Bank Group President [source: “World Bank chief urges global cooperation to tackle food security challenge“] The food scarcity part of the argument in the population debate is an interesting one—people are hungry because they cannot afford food, not because the population is growing so fast that food is becoming scarce. The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account.” –  Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies Throwing Food Away 30% of all food produced in the world each year is wasted or lost. That’s about 1.3 billion tons… That’s as if each person in China, the world’s most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people, had a one ton mass of food they could just throw into the trashcan.” Distributing Food Poorly The amount of grain produced in the world today could provide each person on the planet with the equivalent of two loaves of bread per day…The problem lies in the distribution of the world’s food. The majority of food is produced in economically more developed countries such as USA, but those countries that are really in need of their share of the food to solve their hunger problems, cannot afford the high prices that these farmers charge...
Study Shows Equality Benefits Everyone, Rich And Poor

Study Shows Equality Benefits Everyone, Rich And Poor

“The rich developed societies have reached a turning point in human history. Politics should now be about the quality of social relations and how we can develop harmonious and sustainable societies.”  The Equality Trust, based on the work of Professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, reached this summary after analyzing data showing that societies with greater inequality between rich and poor are far more unhealthy than societies with a more equal income distribution. More Unequal = More Problems The study shows that: More unequal societies have more problems with general health, mental illness, infant mortality, drug use, obesity, imprisonment rates, teenage pregnancies and homicides. More equal societies have better education and general health, more innovation, higher social mobility and more trust. The Spirit Level – slides from The Equality Trust View more presentations from The Equality Trust The slides and their titles (some listed below) show in more detail how societies with bigger gaps between rich and poor are generally more unhealthy societies than more equal societies: Health and social problems are worse in more unequal countries Health and social problems are not related to income in rich countries Health and social problems are worse in unequal US states Health and social problems are only weakly related to average income in US states Child well-being is better in more equal rich countries Child well-being is unrelated to average incomes in rich countries Levels of trust are higher in more equal rich countries Levels of trust are higher in more equal US states The prevalence of mental illness is higher in more unequal rich countries Drug use is more common in more unequal countries Life expectancy...
New Twitter Study Shows Global Happiness On The Decline

New Twitter Study Shows Global Happiness On The Decline

In case you didn’t know, or have yet to receive a tweet about it, twitter is now being used for research. For instance at Cornell University a study was conducted which looked through over 500 million tweets to gauge users moods throughout the day: It turns out that we start our days positively (positive tweets), then our moods begin to decline throughout the day (at around midnight they pick back up again). A more recent study at the University of Vermont has also been conducted in which, “… more then 46 billion words written in Twitter tweets by 63 million Twitters users around the globe…” were analyzed. From this the researchers immersed themselves in a new perspective, In these billions of words is not a view of any individual’s state of mind. Instead, like billions of moving atoms add up to the overall temperature of a room, billions of words used to express what people are feeling resolve into a view of the relative mood of large groups.” Like in the Cornell study, The Vermont team then took these scores and applied them to the huge pool of words they collected from Twitter. Because these tweets each have a date and time, and, sometimes, other demographic information—like location—they show changing patterns of word use that provides insights in the way groups of people are feeling.” The implications of such research? The new approach lets the researchers measure happiness at different scales of time and geography… and stretched out over the last three years, these patterns of word use show a drop in average happiness.” So, the Cornell study measured...