By the Numbers: Hunger in the World

Hunger remains the world’s number one health risk. It kills more people than the planet’s most devastating diseases – such as, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis – combined.

• 925 million people around the world live in a constant state of hunger. That’s more than the combined populations of Canada, the United States and the European Union (E.U.)
   
• 146 million or 1 in 4 children in the world are underweight and malnourished.  Fifty percent of the world’s most hunger children are located in South Asia.
   
• 10.9 million children, under five, die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger related diseases are responsible for more than 60% of these deaths. (UNICEF)
   
• 60 percent of world’s hungry are women (women represent just over half of the world’s population)
   
• 500 million in the Asian, African and Latin American countries are living in what World Bank calls “absolute poverty”.
   

Canada

While most people in Western countries do not know hunger as "ceaseless discomfort, weakness, and pain", poverty knows no boundaries and it afflicts people in both developed and developing nations.

• 9 – Canada is the ninth richest country in the OECD.
   
• 1981– first Canadian food bank was opened in Edmonton.
   
• 1,943– the number of food banks in Canada; also there are more than 3,000 national food programmes that provide assistance to those in need (Food Banking in Canada)
   
• 94,000– the number of people who access a food bank for the first time each month.
   
• 18– percentage of households that depend on food banks because employment income isn’t enough to make ends meet.
   
• 851,014– the number of people assisted in Canada in 2011. That represents an increase of 25.9 % since 2008.

Of the 851,014 individuals assisted:
 

• 37.9% – were children.
   
• 47%– were women.
   
• 4.4%– were seniors 65 and over.
   
• 10%– self-identified as First Nations, Métis or Inuit overall in Canada, but in the four western provinces the self-identification was as high as 24%.

• 11.4%– were recent immigrants or refugees, increasing to 18.5% in large cities.

Source: Hungercount survey 2011