14. Hunger Flashcards
You can think of global food consumers as being on three levels or tiers. At the bottom are about 1.1 billion people (about 20% of the world’s people) who are unable to provide themselves with a healthy diet. These people are classified as ____ ____, and at least 60% of them are children.
food-energy deficient
On the middle level are about 4 billion ____ ____, who get enough calories and plenty of plant-based protein, giving them the healthiest basic diet among the world’s people. They typically receive less than 20% of their calories from fat, a level low enough to protect them from the consequences of excessive dietary fat.
grain eaters
At the top are the world’s billion ____ ____, mainly in Europe and North America who obtain close to 40% of their calories from fat (three times that of the rest of the world’s people).
meat eaters
As people in the middle level (in China. for instance) become more ____, they tend to “move up the food chain” to emulate people at the top.
affluent
The high meat diet of those at the top is not only unhealthy, but creates a demand for meat production that causes a substantial share of the global inequity of food resources and ____ abuse.
environmental
While declining hunger rates may be cause for optimism, it is also true that in terms of absolute numbers there are more hungry people in the world and in America than ever before. because of the continued momentum of ____ ____.
population growth
First, for the present at least. chronic hunger is not caused by too many people or too little food. The world’s farmers produce enough cereals, meat, and other food products to ____ feed the world’s population.
adequately
Second, problems of hunger are caused by the way food is ____ - put another way, because people lack access to the food that exists.
distributed
Explanations of ____ allude to things like inequality and income distribution, population density and growth, agricultural research agendas, social disruptions like wars, social welfare and insurance policies, and agricultural trade and commodity prices.
hunger
Within academic and food policy circles, there are several styles of thinking to ____ why hunger exists, each with different emphases, some supportive evidence, and very different policy implications.
explain
____ ____ argues that the world hunger problem is caused by not enough food and the poor productivity of traditional agriculture, particularly as it is practiced in the LDCs.
Agricultural modernisation
AM. However appealing, it is misleading since everyone admits that the problem is not that there isnt enough food, but how it is ____.
distributed
AM. Furthermore, there is reason to think that if such “modernisation” of traditional agriculture were to take place under the aegis of large multinational agribusiness firms, the world would have more total food, but still there would exist the hunger of those who are malnourished because they are ____.
poor
Ecological neo-Mathusianism is the second way of theorising about the causes of hunger. Its logic seems straightforward: The more people there are, or the faster the rate of ____ ____, the less food and other materials will be available to other people.
population growth
EnM. But as all food analysts agree, even as rapidly as population has grown, it has been ____ by total food production increases.
outstripped
EnM. Population size or growth may not directly cause people to be ____ or die, but it may be a distant and pervasive factor related to more direct causes.
hungry
