thesis of world hunger

Ending hunger

Ending world hunger is one of the greatest challenges of our times. Across the globe, as many as 309 million people are facing acute levels of food insecurity in 2024 in the 72 countries with WFP operations and where data is available. Around  42 million people in 45 countries are at 'emergency' or worse levels of hunger . 

The consequence of diets poor in vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are affecting the health and life prospects of millions more, and casting a shadow over the future of communities and entire countries.  

Although enough food is produced to feed everyone on this planet, the goal of a world with zero hunger , as set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and specifically in  Sustainable Development Goal 2 , remains hugely challenging due to a toxic cocktail of conflict, climate change, disasters and structural poverty and inequality . Over the past two years, the socioeconomic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exacerbated global hunger by pushing millions of vulnerable people into greater food insecurity and driving up the costs of reaching people in need. WFP works on various activities in seeking solutions to hunger.

World hunger: causes and solutions

60 percent of the world’s hungry people live in zones affected by conflict, which is the main driver in 8 out of 10 of the worst hunger crises (as in the case of Yemen, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, for example).

What we are doing 

Food and nutrition assistance

WFP brings life-saving food and nutrition assistance to people trapped or displaced by fighting, wherever they are. With the help of local partners, we reach those in need even in the most remote areas, using all-terrain vehicles and dropping food from planes when all other avenues are closed.

Our assistance can help create pathways to peace, as recognized in the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to WFP in 2020.

Prospects for peace

Preliminary findings from a joint research study with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute indicated that WFP’s work to solve world hunger contributed to improving prospects for peace. It did this by enhancing access to contested natural resources, boosting social cohesion and resolving grievances within and between communities, while increasing opportunities and trust between people and government through strengthening state accountability and service delivery. The study focused on El Salvador, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Mali.

Climate change

The impacts of the climate crisis such as floods, drought or heatwaves affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, aggravating poverty, world hunger and social tensions. WFP helps governments and communities to adopt to the changing climate and protect themselves and their food security from climate impacts.

What we are doing

Anticipatory action

WFP’s Anticipatory Action programme uses early warning systems to trigger humanitarian action before extreme weather events impact communities, allowing them to protect themselves, their homes, livestock and buy food and other essential items. 

Climate-smart energy solutions

To ensure people can cook and consume food safely, WFP facilitates access to modern cooking solutions such as gas stoves, mini-gasifiers or electric pressure cookers. WFP also strives to empower smallholder farmers through the distribution of sustainable energy equipment and services that boost food production, processing and preservation.

When an earthquake, cyclone, a hurricane or other disaster strikes, WFP is a first responder, bringing food and other life-saving assistance to populations that have lost everything.

As the leader of the inter-agency Logistics Cluster , WFP provides coordination and information management in the response to large-scale disasters.

Connectivity

WFP leads the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster , which provides life-saving connectivity in emergency situations. WFP’s Fast IT and Telecommunications Emergency and Support Team of responders (FITTEST) is ready to deploy anywhere in the world to establish and restore communications and information technology networks.

Geospatial analyses

Targeted geospatial analyses show the immediate impact of natural disasters and allow for a faster response matched to needs. Our Geographic Information Systems tools such as ADAM (Automatic Disaster Analysis & Mapping) provide 24/7 mapping of earthquakes and tropical cyclones.

Inequality drives global hunger by limiting people's opportunities and increasing levels of hunger. Increasing access to employment, finance and markets, for example, can lift people out of poverty very quickly, increasing their productivity and spending power, and stimulating local markets.

Food assistance for assets

WFP’s Food Assistance for Assets programme involves people working on community projects such as restoring unproductive land, in return for cash or food. The private sector-focused Farm to Market Alliance connects smallholders to markets and helps them diversify their crops and increase their business potential.

Cash transfers

Where markets and financial systems are functioning, WFP provides assistance in cash. Whether in the form of bank notes, vouchers, debit cards, e-money or mobile money, cash transfers allow people to make choices that improve their food security and nutrition, and inject cash into the local economy.

Social safety nets

WFP supports governments in strengthening the social safety nets they have in place to protect their citizens from poverty, inequality and  hunger. We also work to enhance the ability of these systems to respond to shocks such as disasters or mass population displacements.

Poor storage facilities in farms lead to pest infestations and mould ruining crops. Lack of access to technology and markets means many farmers are forced to watch their crops rot in fields, as the labour and financial investment required to harvest them is often unavailable.

Zero post-harvest losses

WFP’s Zero Post-Harvest Losses project teaches smallholder farmers how to use improved post-harvest handling methods, combined with simple but effective hermetic storage equipment to protect crops against insects, rodents, mould and moisture.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed millions more people into hunger by disrupting production, trade and livelihoods, putting millions out of work.

Common services

WFP set up Common Services – global passenger and cargo movement services – allowing humanitarian staff and food and health supplies to reach vulnerable people around the world, who would otherwise be cut off from support when they needed it most.

Food and cash assistance

To address the increased needs created by the socioeconomic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, WFP has stepped up its cash and food assistance, and supported governments in strengthening their own social safety nets.

Fighting famine

WFP and the Sustainable Development Goals

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How Climate Change Is Causing World Hunger

Rising global temperatures are fueling a global hunger crisis.

Higher temperatures are making extreme weather events like floods, cyclones and heat waves more frequent and more intense – with catastrophic effects on people’s lives and livelihoods around the world. It is the poorest communities that are suffering the most despite contributing the least to the climate crisis.  

While fixing the root causes of climate change may take decades, we can provide immediate relief and solutions to help people become more climate-resilient today.

Global Warming Is Increasing Natural Disasters

Driven by rising temperatures, extreme weather events have increased five-fold over the past 50 years . The decade between 2010 and 2019 was the hottest decade on record. And the planet continued warm: July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded.

Over 1.7 billion people have been affected by climate-related disasters over the past decade. These disasters are happening more often with increasingly devastating effects.  Droughts are lasting longer. Hurricanes and cyclones are more common and more destructive. Floods and wildfires are affecting more parts of the globe.

When these disasters hit, they cause casualties, displacement and extensive property damage. They also often create a hunger crisis.

Climate Disasters Destroy Food Supply Chains

Extreme weather events can destroy vital infrastructure like roads and bridges, making it difficult to transport food to people. Heavy floods and landslides can destroy road networks and railway systems. For remote communities that rely on a single road or access point, functioning local food supply chains can shut down. It also makes it extremely difficult for aid agencies to distribute food to hungry families.

In 2023, Storm Daniel hit Libya and destroyed significant portion of roads and bridges. Two aging dams collapsed, unleashing floods that washed away entire neighborhoods. The damaged infrastructure increased the number of casualties, displacement and hunger.

Climate Change Harms Agriculture and Food Production

Global heating can devastate agriculture in the short-term and the long-term. Frequent and intense climate-related disasters wipe out vast stretches of farmland and destroy entire harvests. Hunger begins to grow as people lost access to food.

Over time, recurring floods or droughts degrade soil, which makes farmland barren and reduces both the amount and quality of food that can be grown. It can take years for agricultural production to recover, which puts the community at long-term risk of hunger as food supplies dwindle.

In South Sudan , both recurring floods and droughts are wreaking havoc on farmland. During four consecutive years of floods, water did not recede fast enough for farmers to replant before the next flood hit. Large swathes of land in South Sudan are still submerged underwater. Yet in other parts of the country, prolonged drought has rendered farmland dry and desolate.

Global Warming Is Affecting the Most Vulnerable

The countries and communities that contribute the least to the climate crisis are suffering the greatest losses .

When a climate disaster strikes, people who are already struggling with hunger quickly lose what little resources and security they had. For families who are living on less than $2 dollars a day, this loss forces them to make difficult decisions just to survive – whether that means selling their remaining livestock or taking their kids out of school to save money. Decisions like these save families money in the short term, but they hurt their ability to access food in the future.

As climate change increases the frequency of these disasters, vulnerable communities don’t have enough time to recover and rebuild their livelihoods before the next one hits. They’re caught in a cycle of destruction, poverty and hunger.

The Climate Crisis Is Fueling Other Crises

Climate-induced poverty and displacement triggers other crises, like instability, conflict and mass migration.

When disasters wipe out crops and livestock, food prices go up. This leads to regional instability as people compete over scarce resources or protest over high food costs. Conflict can then erupt and trigger mass migration as people flee in search of food and safety. In Syria , a severe three-year drought was a contributing factor to the social unrest that pushed the country to civil war. The drought caused widespread crop damage, wiping out the country’s northeast agricultural system and pushing up food prices. Unrest sprouted as families were plunged into poverty and hunger.

All crises are interconnected. The climate crisis fans the flames of existing pre-existing risks and sparks crises like conflict and inflation. 

How to Help People Become Climate Resilient

Combating the root causes of the climate crisis may take decades, but the effects of climate extremes are devastating communities now . Disadvantaged communities urgently need solutions to build resilience to relentless extreme weather events.

In the immediate aftermath of climate-related disasters, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) provides emergency food supplies to survivors. Then, the U.N. World Food Programme gets to work helping communities build infrastructure and learn skills like engineering that can protect them against future disasters.

Through its climate action work, the U.N. World Food Programme helps countries and communities anticipate climate hazards, restore degraded ecosystems and access to sustainable energy solutions.

In the Sahel where drought has dried up crops, we taught people how to dig crescent-shaped pits called “half-moons”  so they could retain more water rehabilitate farmland.

The Climate Crisis Is a Human Crisis

The climate crisis isn’t a problem in the distant future. It’s affecting people’s lives today. As the temperatures rise, so does hunger. Around the world, people’s livelihoods are drying up and their dreams wash away in floods.

You can help vulnerable communities prepare for and recover from these kinds of climate extremes.

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World Hunger and Poverty

Author and page information.

• by Anup Shah
• This page last updated Sunday, August 22, 2010
• This page: https://www.globalissues.org/issue/6/world-hunger-and-poverty .
• https://www.globalissues.org/print/issue/6

We often hear about people’s desire to solve world hunger, or to be able to feed the world and help alleviate the suffering associated with it.

However, meaningful long-term alleviation to hunger is rooted in the alleviation of poverty, as poverty leads to hunger. World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty. If efforts are only directed at providing food, or improving food production or distribution, then the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency would still remain. And so while continuous effort, resources and energies are deployed to relieve hunger through these technical measures, the political causes require political solutions as well.

4 articles on “World Hunger and Poverty” and 3 related issues:

Causes of Hunger are related to Poverty

There are many inter-related issues causing hunger, which are related to economics and other factors that cause poverty. They include land rights and ownership, diversion of land use to non-productive use, increasing emphasis on export-oriented agriculture, inefficient agricultural practices, war, famine, drought, over-fishing, poor crop yields, etc. This section introduces some of these issues.

Read “ Causes of Hunger are related to Poverty ” to learn more.

Solving World Hunger Means Solving World Poverty

Solving world hunger in the conventional sense (of providing/growing more food etc) will not tackle poverty that leads to hunger in the first place. Further, there is a risk of continuing the poverty and dependency without realizing it, because the act of attempting to provide more food etc can appear so altruistic in motive. To solve world hunger in the long run, poverty alleviation is required.

Read “ Solving World Hunger Means Solving World Poverty ” to learn more.

Population and Feeding the World

The food scarcity part of the argument in the population debate is an interesting one -- people are hungry not because the population is growing so fast that food is becoming scarce, but because people cannot afford it. Food may be scarce, but it is international trade, economic policies and the control of land that have lead to immense poverty and hunger and therefore less access to food, not food scarcity due to over population.

Read “ Population and Feeding the World ” to learn more.

Food and Agriculture Issues

This issue explores topics ranging from the global food crisis of 2008, to issues of food aid, world hunger, food dumping and wasteful agriculture such as growing tobacco, sugar, beef, and more.

Read “ Food and Agriculture Issues ” to learn more.

Food Dumping [Aid] Maintains Poverty

Food aid (when not for emergency relief) can actually be very destructive on the economy of the recipient nation and contribute to more hunger and poverty in the long term. Free, subsidized, or cheap food, below market prices undercuts local farmers, who cannot compete and are driven out of jobs and into poverty, further slanting the market share of the larger producers such as those from the US and Europe. Many poor nations are dependent on farming, and so such food aid amounts to food dumping. In the past few decades, more powerful nations have used this as a foreign policy tool for dominance rather than for real aid.

Read “ Food Dumping [Aid] Maintains Poverty ” to learn more.

Causes of Poverty

Poverty is the state for the majority of the world’s people and nations. Why is this? Is it enough to blame poor people for their own predicament? Have they been lazy, made poor decisions, and been solely responsible for their plight? What about their governments? Have they pursued policies that actually harm successful development? Such causes of poverty and inequality are no doubt real. But deeper and more global causes of poverty are often less discussed.

Read “ Causes of Poverty ” to learn more.

World hunger related links for more information

Links to web sites and articles that discuss world hunger, the relationship between populations and hunger, of poverty and hunger, agricultural issues, land rights and so on.

Read “ World hunger related links for more information ” to learn more.

Author and Page Information

• Created: Sunday, September 24, 2000
• Last updated: Sunday, August 22, 2010

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World Hunger: A Moral Response

• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
• Focus Areas
• More Focus Areas

This article explores whether or not people have a moral obligation to feed poor nations from several different aspects.">

Between now and tomorrow morning, 40,000 children will starve to death. The day after tomorrow, 40,000 more children will die, and so on throughout 1992. In a "world of plenty," the number of human beings dying or suffering from hunger, malnutrition, and hunger-related diseases is staggering. According to the World Bank, over 1 billion people—at least one quarter of the world's population—live in poverty. Over half of these people live in South Asia; most of the remainder in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia.

The contrast between these peoples and the populations of rich nations is a stark one. In the poor nations of South Asia, the mortality rate among children under the age of 5 is more than 170 deaths per thousand, while in Sweden it is fewer than 10. In sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy is 50 years, while in Japan it is 80.

These contrasts raise the question of whether people living in rich nations have a moral obligation to aid those in poor nations. Currently, less than 1/2 of 1% of the total world gross national product is devoted to aiding poverty-stricken nations. In 1988, the amount of aid from the U S. amounted to only 0.21% of its GNP. In 1990, the World Bank urged the international community to increase aid to poor countries to 0.7% of their GNP. If this goal is reached, poverty could be reduced by as much as 40% by the end of this decade. What is the extent of our duty to poor nations?

We Have No Obligation to Aid Poor Nations Some ethicists argue that rich nations have no obligation to aid poor nations. Our moral duty, they claim, is always to act in ways that will maximize human happiness and minimize human suffering. In the long run, aiding poor nations will produce far more suffering than it will alleviate. Nations with the highest incidence of poverty also have the highest birthrates. One report estimates that more than 90% of the world's total population growth between now and the year 2025 will occur in developing countries. Providing aid to people in such countries will only allow more of them to survive and reproduce, placing ever greater demands on the world's limited food supply. And as the populations of these countries swell, more people will be forced onto marginal and environmentally fragile lands, leading to widespread land degradation, further reducing the land available for food production. The increase in demands on the limited food supply combined with a decrease in the production of food will threaten the survival of future generations of all peoples, rich and poor.

Others claim that, even in the short-run, little benefit is derived from aiding poor nations. Aid sent to developing countries rarely reaches the people it was intended to benefit. Instead, it is used by oppressive governments to subsidize their military or spent on projects that benefit local elites, or ends up on the black market. Between 1978 and 1984, more than 80% of 596 million of food aid sent to Somalia went to the military and other public institutions. In El Salvador, 80% of U.S. aid in dry milk ended up on the black market. Furthermore, giving aid to poor countries undermines any incentive on the part of these countries to become self-sufficient through programs that would benefit the poor, such as those that would increase food production or control population growth. Food aid, for example, depresses local food prices, discouraging local food production and agricultural development. Poor dairy farmers in El Salvador have found themselves competing against free milk from the U.S. As a result of aid, many countries, such as Haiti, Sudan, and Zaire, have become aid dependent.

Some ethicists maintain that the principle of justice also dictates against aiding poor nations. Justice requires that benefits and burdens be distributed fairly among peoples. Nations that have planned for the needs of their citizens by regulating food production to ensure an adequate food supply for the present, as well as a surplus for emergencies, and nations that have implemented programs to limit population growth, should enjoy the benefits of their foresight. Many poor nations have irresponsibly failed to adopt policies that would stimulate food production and development. Instead, resources are spent on lavish projects or military regimes. Consider the $200 million air-conditioned cathedral recently constructed in the impoverished country of Cote D'Ivoire. Or consider that, in 1986, developing countries spent six times what they received in aid on their armed forces. Such nations that have failed to act responsibly should bear the consequences. It is unjust to ask nations that have acted responsibly to now assume the burdens of those nations that have not.

Finally, it is argued, all persons have a basic right to freedom, which includes the right to use the resources they have legitimately acquired as they freely choose. To oblige people in wealthy nations to give aid to poor nations violates this right. Aiding poor nations may be praiseworthy, but not obligatory.

We Have an Obligation to Aid Poor Nations Many maintain that the citizens of rich nations have a moral obligation to aid poor nations. First, some have argued, all persons have a moral obligation to prevent harm when doing so would not cause comparable harm to themselves. It is clear that suffering and death from starvation are harms. It is also clear that minor financial sacrifices on the part of people of rich nations can prevent massive amounts of suffering and death from starvation. Thus, they conclude, people in rich nations have a moral obligation to aid poor nations. Every week more than a quarter of a million children die from malnutrition and illness. Many of these deaths are preventable. For example, the diarrhea disease and respiratory infections that claim the lives of 16,000 children every day could be prevented by 10 cent packets of oral rehydration salts or by antibiotics usually costing under a dollar. The aid needed to prevent the great majority of child illness and death due to malnutrition in the next decade is equal to the amount of money spent in the U.S. to advertise cigarettes. It is well within the capacity of peoples of rich nations as collectives or as individuals to prevent these avoidable deaths and to reduce this misery without sacrificing anything of comparable significance. Personalizing the argument, Peter Singer, a contemporary philosopher, writes:

Just how much we will think ourselves obliged to give up will depend on what we consider to be of comparable moral significance to the poverty we could prevent: color television, stylish clothes, expensive dinners, a sophisticated stereo system, overseas holidays, a (second ?) car, a larger house, private schools for our children . . . none of these is likely to be of comparable significance to the reduction of absolute poverty.

Giving aid to the poor in other nations may require some inconvenience or some sacrifice of luxury on the part of peoples of rich nations, but to ignore the plight of starving people is as morally reprehensible as failing to save a child drowning in a pool because of the inconvenience of getting one's clothes wet.

In fact, according to Singer, allowing a person to die from hunger when it is easily within one's means to prevent it is no different, morally speaking, from killing another human being. If I purchase a VCR or spend money I don't need, knowing that I could instead have given my money to some relief agency that could have prevented some deaths from starvation, I am morally responsible for those deaths. The objection that I didn't intend for anyone to die is irrelevant. If I speed though an intersection and, as a result, kill a pedestrian, I am morally responsible for that death whether I intended it or not.

In making a case for aid to poor nations, others appeal to the principle of justice. Justice demands that people be compensated for the harms and injustices suffered at the hands of others. Much of the poverty of developing nations, they argue, is the result of unjust and exploitative policies of governments and corporations in wealthy countries. The protectionist trade policies of rich nations, for example, have driven down the price of exports of poor nations. According to one report, the European Economic Community imposes a tariff four times as high against cloth imported from poor nations as from rich ones. Such trade barriers cost developing countries $50 to $100 billion a year in lost sales and depressed markets. Moreover, the massive debt burdens consuming the resources of poor nations is the result of the tight monetary policies adopted by developed nations which drove up interest rates on the loans that had been made to these countries. In 1989, Third World countries owed $1.2 trillion nearly half of their total CNP to banks and governments in industrial countries. According to one report, since 1988, $50 billion a year has been transferred from poor nations to rich nations to service these debts.

Those who claim that wealthy nations have a duty to aid poor nations counter the argument that aiding poor nations will produce more suffering than happiness in the long run. First, they argue, there is no evidence to support the charge that aiding poor nations will lead to rapid population growth in these nations, thus straining the world's resource supply. Research shows that as poverty decreases, fertility rates decline. When people are economically secure, they have less need to have large families to ensure that they will be supported in old age. As infant mortality declines, there is less need to have more children to insure against the likelihood that some will die. With more aid, then, there is a fair chance that population growth will be brought under control.

Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it is rich countries, not poor countries, that pose a threat to the world's resource supply. The average American uses up to thirty times more of the world's resources than does the average Asian or African. If our concern is to ensure that there is an adequate resource base for the world's population, policies aimed at decreasing consumption by rich nations should be adopted.

Those who support aid to poor nations also counter the argument that aid to poor nations rarely accomplishes what it was intended to accomplish. As a result of aid, they point out, many countries have significantly reduced poverty and moved from dependence to self reliance. Aid has allowed Indonesia, for example, to reduce poverty from 58% to 17% in less than a generation. There are, unfortunately, instances in which the poor haven't benefitted from aid, but such cases only move us to find more effective ways to combat poverty in these countries, be it canceling debts, lowering trade restrictions, or improving distribution mechanisms for direct aid. Furthermore, poor nations would benefit from aid if more aid was sent to them in the first place. In 1988, 41% of all aid was directed to high-income and middle-income countries, rather than to low income countries. According to the World Bank, only 8% of U.S. aid in 1986 could be identified as development assistance devoted to low income countries. Obviously poor countries can't benefit from aid if they're not receiving it.

Finally, it is argued, all human beings have dignity deserving of respect and are entitled to what is necessary to live in dignity, including a right to life and a right to the goods necessary to satisfy one's basic needs. This right to satisfy basic needs takes precedence over the rights of others to accumulate wealth and property. When people are without the resources needed to survive, those with surplus resources are obligated to come to their aid.

In the coming decade, the gap between rich nations and poor nations will grow and appeals for assistance will multiply. How peoples of rich nations respond to the plight of those in poor nations will depend, in part, on how they come to view their duty to poor nations--taking into account justice and fairness, the benefits and harms of aid, and moral rights, including the right to accumulate surplus and the right to resources to meet basic human needs.

"I begin with the assumption that suffering from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.... My next point is this: if it is within our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it." --Peter Singer

Further reading

Brown, L. R. State of the World 1990: A Worldwatch Institute Report on progress toward a sustainable society. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Hardin, G. Lifeboat ethics: "The case against helping the poor." Psychology Today , September 1974, 8, pp. 38-43; 123-126.

Helmuth, J. W. "World hunger amidst plenty." USA Today , March 1989, 117, pp. 48-50. Singer, P. "Famine, affluence, and morality." Philosophy and Public Affairs , Spring 1972, 1, (3), pp. 229-243.

Worid Bank. World development report 1990: Poverty . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

World Commission on Environment and Development. Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

This article was originally published in Issues in Ethics - V. 5, N. 1 Spring 1992

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“… reducing the amount of food that we waste by just a third could feed all the food-insecure people in this country,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School.

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How food donations can help fight hunger and climate change

Harvard Staff Writer

Law Professor Emily Broad Leib examines legal and other hurdles to reducing waste

Every year, nearly 700 million people suffer from hunger around the world, while 1.3 billion tons of food are thrown away. Both food waste and hunger have increased during the pandemic.

It doesn’t have to be that way, said Emily Broad Leib , director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. The Gazette interviewed Broad Leib about the ways in which food donation could help the fight against hunger as well as climate change.

Emily Broad Leib

GAZETTE: How did you get interested in the subject of food law?

BROAD LEIB: When I went to Harvard Law School, my focus was international human rights. After Law School, I did a fellowship in community development in rural Mississippi, and one of the first projects I worked on was legal training for local farmers and farmers markets. They wanted to grow foods, but they didn’t know what they were allowed to sell. Everything grew from there. There is a huge change around what people want the food system to do. For a lot of the 1900s into the early 2000s, the idea was just that food appears at the store; we buy it; and we bring it to our house. Now people are thinking a lot more about what’s in our food, how it is impacting us, what it is doing to the environment, where it is coming from, and who the workers are who produce this food. A lot of fields are implicated in this, but law has a lot to say in how we answer questions about our priorities, the transparency in the food system, and who are the winners and losers.

GAZETTE: How can food donation help the fight against hunger?

BROAD LEIB: Prior to COVID, there were about 690 million people globally living in hunger, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Estimates are that, because of COVID, that increased to between 720 to 811 million people, and rates of extreme hunger have also gone up. There are a lot of factors causing hunger. A big piece relates to economics and well-paying jobs, but hunger also is a day-to-day need, and long-term solutions, while they’re necessary, can’t resolve the day-to-day problem that people are facing. There is a movement to think about the right to food, which a lot of countries recognize, as one that includes the right to not have food go to waste. We put a lot of energy into producing that food, and the best thing that we can do is make sure that it goes to someone who is in need. In the U.S., there is data that shows that reducing the amount of food that we waste by just a third could feed all the food-insecure people in this country. There is nothing worse than thinking about people being in hunger while watching surplus food rot in the field or get thrown into a dumpster.

GAZETTE : What are the obstacles in the law that prevent food donation?

BROAD LEIB: There are two sides to it. On one side, there are actual legal and policy barriers to donating, and they can be real or perceived. As an example of a perceived barrier, in the U.S., we don’t mention food donation in any of our food safety laws. We’re strict about food safety; almost everything is regulated but so often food is wasted because it’s not clear what can you do with the food, whether it is allowed to be donated or not.

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In some countries, there are real barriers to donating food. In our research, we found that in some countries, there is a tax penalty for donating food instead of throwing it away. This happens in Argentina. In general, businesses that acquire food have to pay a value added tax [VAT] and can recover that money from the consumer. In Argentina, when you throw food away, you can claim a credit from the government for the VAT that you paid, but when you donate food, you can’t claim that same credit. There is a real economic penalty to donating versus throwing it away.

On the other side, there is a lack of incentive to donate food. In many countries, there is no tax benefit, or if there is, it’s very low. Also, it’s not necessarily cost-effective to donate food because you need to treat it carefully, have extra space in your freezers and trucks to transport it, and you need to train workers. Thinking about food coming from the farm, in the U.S., recent estimates say that we probably waste 13 million tons per year of food on the farm that doesn’t get harvested because either it’s not up to the aesthetic standards or the farmer met their goal for the contract and there’s extra that they just don’t need. There is a cost associated with harvesting and transporting that food, and if you can’t make the numbers work for businesses, it’s hard to say to them that we want them to spend all this money and time doing what’s good for society if that’s not actually going to make economic sense for them.

Part of our work has been to explore the different categories of barriers and the universal issues that people bring up when it comes to food donation. That has been our work in the Global Food Donation Policy Atlas , a project we conduct in partnership with the nonprofit Global FoodBanking Network that maps barriers and best practices to food donation around the world.

GAZETTE : What are the main findings of this atlas?

BROAD LEIB : In the first year, we picked a range of five countries (out of our initial list of 15) to look at the universal issues surrounding food donation. Now we’re looking at a broader set of countries to compare their policies and see who has the best practice or the best policy on various areas related to food donation. The atlas is trying to answer those questions and help users identify the very strongest model laws, while giving also specific useful tools to each individual country. For each participating country, we include a detailed legal guide of their current laws that food banks or food donors can use right now to find out what is allowed and what is not. There are recommendations for what are the top few changes, based on our conversations with our food bank partners, governments, and businesses, that really need to happen to make food donation more of a habit rather than being taboo or something that only happens occasionally.

GAZETTE: How do U.S. food donation policies compare to other countries in your atlas?

BROAD LEIB: When we first started the project, we thought the U.S. could strengthen its own policies, but when you look around the world, there are areas where we might be better off than other countries. It doesn’t mean that we have it right 100 percent. There are areas where we’re behind, such as date labeling on food products. We have all the resources and the capability of making those dates clear and comprehensible, and we’re just not doing it. The EU is blowing us out of the water; the U.K. has clear standard labels on food and guidance documents for consumers, businesses, and food banks about how foods can be eaten after the expiration date or can be donated. They’re light years ahead of us. But in terms of tax incentives for food donors, we have the most generous of any country. Food donors in the U.S. can get a very good incentive when they donate food, and that could be an example for other countries to follow. Over time, we’ll add more countries to the atlas, but even now you can get a good idea on where the hotspots are, where we’re doing well, and where we can make progress.

GAZETTE: How much of the food produced in the U.S. is donated?

BROAD LEIB: Studies estimate that between 7 and 10 percent of the U.S. surplus food gets donated. The rest of the surplus food goes to landfills; some to combustion, which is incinerated. There is so much edible food that is getting thrown away. It’s so disheartening. If you go behind any store and look in its dumpster, a large majority of what is in there could be in my refrigerator right now.

GAZETTE: How can food donation help the fight against climate change?

BROAD LEIB : The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] put out a report 18 months ago about food production and climate change, in which they found that about 8 to 10 percent of global anthropogenic emissions come from food waste. That is a sizable amount. There are lots of other places where we can reduce emissions, but it’s going to be tricky because those emissions meet other needs; we need electricity, energy. Reducing food waste seems to be one of those areas that is a win-win situation. No one is benefiting when we throw food away. The production of food itself causes emissions, and when the food goes to the landfill, it’s a huge emitter of methane. So that’s not good on either end of it.

GAZETTE: What is the impact of COVID on hunger and food waste?

BROAD LEIB: Hunger has increased because of COVID but so has food waste. In a lot of cases, it’s because certain supply chains got shut down. Food that typically goes to hotels or restaurants — and this also happened in the U.S. — suddenly had to be wasted because nobody knew where to send the food, and our supply chain wasn’t flexible enough to get all that food to grocery stores or food pantries. Feeding America, the network of food banks in the U.S., has seen an increase of need for food bank services, and that 75 percent of the people knocking on their doors were first-time users of food banks. Much of the food that goes to waste is totally fine and edible and it gets wasted because of log jams in the marketplace or confusion over date labels.

GAZETTE:  What would you like to see happening in the landscape of food donation policies?

BROAD LEIB:   We’ve already seen a lot more awareness about these topics and I think that will manifest in both being more thoughtful about food waste and food donation, but also around treating the land and workers in the food supply better. Every meal that we eat is magical when you think about how all these things came together, and they’re all only renewable resources if we treat them with respect, including the workers. My hope is that we’re moving toward a direction where there’s more respect for all the ingredients in the food system.

I’ve done a lot of research domestically around law school teaching and scholarship on food systems, and I’m doing a project now looking at teaching in law schools globally in this field. I think there is a real opportunity for learning and collaboration about these issues amongst lawyers. My hope is also that there are more active partnerships across countries on not just food donation, but on other food policy issues as well. At this point, more than 25 students from Harvard Law School have been involved in the atlas, and I wanted to acknowledge that. Part of my hope is that we’re training thoughtful leaders in this space who can evolve and build on this work in the future.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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World Hunger Essay

World hunger is a problem that has existed for centuries. Despite the efforts of many organizations and individuals, the number of people who are hungry or at risk of hunger continues to rise. According to the World Food Programme, there are about 795 million people who are chronically undernourished, which means that they do not have enough food to lead a healthy and active life.

The causes of world hunger are complex and multi-faceted, but there are some common underlying factors. One of the main causes is poverty. People living in poverty do not have the money to buy food, or they may not have access to land where they can grow their own food. Another major cause of world hunger is conflict. When countries are in conflict, it disrupts the distribution of food and can lead to widespread famine. Natural disasters, such as droughts and floods, can also cause food shortages.

There are many ways to address world hunger. One way is to provide emergency food assistance to people who are affected by natural disasters or conflicts. Another way is to work on long-term solutions such as economic development and agricultural reform.

World hunger is a complex problem that requires a multi-faceted approach to be effectively addressed. However, with concerted effort and cooperation, it is possible to make progress in the fight against hunger.

As I speak these words to you, a youngster somewhere on this planet will have perished from starvation. A child. Children are the most vulnerable of us: they trust everyone instinctively, and their purity is genuine and appropriate and necessary–and they’re dying in far-flung regions of the globe until their skin stretches over their bones and they don’t have the strength, desire, or capacity to cry out anymore. You may feel for them with compassion or guilt or simply an understanding of their condition.

They become a statistic, one more number in the millions that die each year from something as preventable and solvable as hunger.

World hunger is one of the biggest problems faced by the human race. It’s not just a problem in developing countries, either. In our own country, the United States of America, there are children going to bed hungry every night. Just think about that for a moment. In the richest country in the world, with more resources than any other nation, there are still children who don’t have enough to eat. That’s shameful.

The problem of world hunger is complex and multi-faceted. There are many factors that contribute to it: war, natural disasters, poverty, poor infrastructure and access to resources, and more. But the bottom line is that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. So why are people still going hungry?

There are a number of organizations working to solve the problem of world hunger. One of them is World Food Programme (WFP). The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, working to end hunger worldwide. They provide food assistance in emergencies and help communities develop long-term solutions to hunger.

You can help fight world hunger by supporting the WFP or another organization working to end hunger. You can also donate money or time to local food banks or soup kitchens. Or you can advocate for policies that will help reduce hunger and poverty.

The bottom line is that we can end world hunger. But it’s going to take all of us working together to make it happen.

Despite this, they remain hungry while their countries suffer from deadly plagues that demand sweet forgiveness. You may believe you can do nothing, but a single dollar here and there seems to fall off your fingers without a second thought—dollars that could feed starving families for days.

In order to truly address the problem of world hunger, not only must someone travel to these nations and improve their infrastructure in order to give assistance, but you must also keep them in mind so that their suffering does not go unnoticed. The first step is changing one’s diet.

People in these areas often don’t have access to gardens or grocery stores. Without a change in diet, the people will never be able to properly absorb the nutrients they need. They must have access to education so that they can learn about food and its value, not only for themselves but also for their families. The next issue is infrastructure.

These countries must have access to clean water and sanitation so that disease doesn’t spread like wildfire through their communities. They also need roads and transportation so that they can get food and supplies to where they’re needed most. And finally, they need medical care. Too often, children die because they don’t have access to basic medical care, such as vaccinations. World hunger is a problem that can be solved, but it will take more than just money.

It will take a change in mindset and a willingness to help those who cannot help themselves. With your help, we can make the world a better place for everyone. World hunger is a global issue that effects us all. We need to work together to find a solution so that everyone can have access to food and live a healthy life. Thank you for your time and consideration. World hunger must end now.

World hunger is defined as “a condition in which people lack the means necessary to obtain adequate food on a daily basis” (www.endworldhunger.org). According to the World Food Programme, there are 795 million people around the world who are affected by hunger on a daily basis, including 155 million children under the age of five.

Some countries have the resources to provide children with adequate calories to develop and thrive, yet they waste away and die. This is due to malnutrition. Micronutrients (particularly protein) are lacking in many fatal diseases due to a lack of macronutrients (especially protein).

Both kwashiorkor and marasmus are particularly terrible and prevalent forms of malnutrition. Kwashiorkor occurs as a result of a deficit in protein, whereas marasmus results from an absence of all minerals. Both induce youngsters to become heartbreaking images made up of skin and bones. The method to properly subsist on farm must be established in every nation on the planet in order to address this.

World hunger has many causes, but all of them are interconnected. Poverty is the main cause of world hunger. According to World Bank, “Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for tomorrow, living one day at a time.”

This means that people who are poor do not have enough money to buy food or clothes or even pay their rent. They also do not have enough money to go to the doctor when they are sick and they cannot afford to send their children to school because they need them to work in order to earn some money.

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Causes and Solutions to World Hunger Thesis Defense

Causes and solutions to world hunger thesis defense presentation, free google slides theme and powerpoint template.

Imagine being the one who got the most detailed research on the causes of world hunger. Even better, that research includes solutions to it that can actually be put into practice. Would the thesis defense be something you should be worried about if that person were you? If you use this template, no worries at all! This modern design is completely editable so that you add the most important parts of your dissertation to the slides. It's organized into different sections in order to save you a bit of time. Get working, because your thesis will be a true reference from now on!

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How to write a thesis statement, what is a thesis statement.

Almost all of us—even if we don’t do it consciously—look early in an essay for a one- or two-sentence condensation of the argument or analysis that is to follow. We refer to that condensation as a thesis statement.

Why Should Your Essay Contain a Thesis Statement?

• to test your ideas by distilling them into a sentence or two
• to better organize and develop your argument
• to provide your reader with a “guide” to your argument

In general, your thesis statement will accomplish these goals if you think of the thesis as the answer to the question your paper explores.

How Can You Write a Good Thesis Statement?

Here are some helpful hints to get you started. You can either scroll down or select a link to a specific topic.

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned

Almost all assignments, no matter how complicated, can be reduced to a single question. Your first step, then, is to distill the assignment into a specific question. For example, if your assignment is, “Write a report to the local school board explaining the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class,” turn the request into a question like, “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” After you’ve chosen the question your essay will answer, compose one or two complete sentences answering that question.

Q: “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” A: “The potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class are . . .”

A: “Using computers in a fourth-grade class promises to improve . . .”

The answer to the question is the thesis statement for the essay.

[ Back to top ]

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned

Even if your assignment doesn’t ask a specific question, your thesis statement still needs to answer a question about the issue you’d like to explore. In this situation, your job is to figure out what question you’d like to write about.

A good thesis statement will usually include the following four attributes:

• take on a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree
• deal with a subject that can be adequately treated given the nature of the assignment
• express one main idea
• assert your conclusions about a subject

Let’s see how to generate a thesis statement for a social policy paper.

Brainstorm the topic . Let’s say that your class focuses upon the problems posed by changes in the dietary habits of Americans. You find that you are interested in the amount of sugar Americans consume.

You start out with a thesis statement like this:

Sugar consumption.

This fragment isn’t a thesis statement. Instead, it simply indicates a general subject. Furthermore, your reader doesn’t know what you want to say about sugar consumption.

Narrow the topic . Your readings about the topic, however, have led you to the conclusion that elementary school children are consuming far more sugar than is healthy.

You change your thesis to look like this:

Reducing sugar consumption by elementary school children.

This fragment not only announces your subject, but it focuses on one segment of the population: elementary school children. Furthermore, it raises a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree, because while most people might agree that children consume more sugar than they used to, not everyone would agree on what should be done or who should do it. You should note that this fragment is not a thesis statement because your reader doesn’t know your conclusions on the topic.

Take a position on the topic. After reflecting on the topic a little while longer, you decide that what you really want to say about this topic is that something should be done to reduce the amount of sugar these children consume.

You revise your thesis statement to look like this:

More attention should be paid to the food and beverage choices available to elementary school children.

This statement asserts your position, but the terms more attention and food and beverage choices are vague.

Use specific language . You decide to explain what you mean about food and beverage choices , so you write:

Experts estimate that half of elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

This statement is specific, but it isn’t a thesis. It merely reports a statistic instead of making an assertion.

Make an assertion based on clearly stated support. You finally revise your thesis statement one more time to look like this:

Because half of all American elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar, schools should be required to replace the beverages in soda machines with healthy alternatives.

Notice how the thesis answers the question, “What should be done to reduce sugar consumption by children, and who should do it?” When you started thinking about the paper, you may not have had a specific question in mind, but as you became more involved in the topic, your ideas became more specific. Your thesis changed to reflect your new insights.

How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One

1. a strong thesis statement takes some sort of stand..

Remember that your thesis needs to show your conclusions about a subject. For example, if you are writing a paper for a class on fitness, you might be asked to choose a popular weight-loss product to evaluate. Here are two thesis statements:

There are some negative and positive aspects to the Banana Herb Tea Supplement.

This is a weak thesis statement. First, it fails to take a stand. Second, the phrase negative and positive aspects is vague.

Because Banana Herb Tea Supplement promotes rapid weight loss that results in the loss of muscle and lean body mass, it poses a potential danger to customers.

This is a strong thesis because it takes a stand, and because it's specific.

2. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion.

Your thesis should indicate the point of the discussion. If your assignment is to write a paper on kinship systems, using your own family as an example, you might come up with either of these two thesis statements:

My family is an extended family.

This is a weak thesis because it merely states an observation. Your reader won’t be able to tell the point of the statement, and will probably stop reading.

While most American families would view consanguineal marriage as a threat to the nuclear family structure, many Iranian families, like my own, believe that these marriages help reinforce kinship ties in an extended family.

This is a strong thesis because it shows how your experience contradicts a widely-accepted view. A good strategy for creating a strong thesis is to show that the topic is controversial. Readers will be interested in reading the rest of the essay to see how you support your point.

3. A strong thesis statement expresses one main idea.

Readers need to be able to see that your paper has one main point. If your thesis statement expresses more than one idea, then you might confuse your readers about the subject of your paper. For example:

Companies need to exploit the marketing potential of the Internet, and Web pages can provide both advertising and customer support.

This is a weak thesis statement because the reader can’t decide whether the paper is about marketing on the Internet or Web pages. To revise the thesis, the relationship between the two ideas needs to become more clear. One way to revise the thesis would be to write:

Because the Internet is filled with tremendous marketing potential, companies should exploit this potential by using Web pages that offer both advertising and customer support.

This is a strong thesis because it shows that the two ideas are related. Hint: a great many clear and engaging thesis statements contain words like because , since , so , although , unless , and however .

4. A strong thesis statement is specific.

A thesis statement should show exactly what your paper will be about, and will help you keep your paper to a manageable topic. For example, if you're writing a seven-to-ten page paper on hunger, you might say:

World hunger has many causes and effects.

This is a weak thesis statement for two major reasons. First, world hunger can’t be discussed thoroughly in seven to ten pages. Second, many causes and effects is vague. You should be able to identify specific causes and effects. A revised thesis might look like this:

Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable.

This is a strong thesis statement because it narrows the subject to a more specific and manageable topic, and it also identifies the specific causes for the existence of hunger.

Produced by Writing Tutorial Services, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 03 May 2024

Hunger on campus: why US PhD students are fighting over food

• Laurie Udesky 0

Laurie Udesky is a freelance journalist in San Francisco, California.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

You have full access to this article via your institution.

An on-campus food pantry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison helps students with insufficient money for food. Credit: M. P. King/Wisconsin State Journal/AP/Alamy

Jen Cruz’s life as a PhD student is a world away from her childhood. Although not a member of the tribe, she grew up on Yakama Indian reservation land in Wapato, Washington.

Cruz, a first-generation university student, remembers how families, including hers, would often work for local farmers or fishers in exchange for food to supplement the food stamps and free school lunches that most people on the reservation relied on to get by.

Collection: Career resources for PhD students

But once at university, Cruz found that the give and take and sense of community that had helped people to survive just didn’t exist on campus. She relied on food stamps issued by the state during her master’s degree in public health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “I also took out loans and worked several jobs,” she says. “When the stamps ran out, I’d go to the food pantry.” These are distribution centres where people facing hunger can receive donated food, akin to food banks in other parts of the world.

Now four years into a PhD in social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, Cruz no longer thinks of herself as food insecure — unable to count on having enough food to be active and healthy — but things are still tight in a city where the cost of living requires a single adult to earn US$62,500 annually to support themselves.

In addition to working full time on her dissertation, she does 20 hours a week as a researcher for a faculty-member colleague, and also teaches to supplement her $37,000 stipend (Harvard will be raising PhD student stipends to a minimum of $50,000 in July). She shops at a discount farmers’ market where she can buy a week’s worth of produce for $10, and she shares accommodation with two other people to minimize housing costs.

Hard evidence

A study published in February revealed that food insecurity at Harvard is not just anecdotal ( N. M. Hammad and C. W. Leung JAMA Netw. Open 7 , e2356894; 2024 ). Commissioned by the dean’s office at Harvard’s School of Public Health, the survey found that 17% of the 1,287 graduate students who responded and 13% of the 458 postdoctoral responders had experienced food insecurity — figures that were on a par with or exceeded those for the general US population (13%).

Respondents reported having to skip meals, cut down their portions and fill up on foods with little nutritional value. Some also reported feeling anxious that they wouldn’t have enough to eat. Food insecurity also correlated with respondents feeling that their housing was at risk because of difficulties with rent or mortgage payments

Widespread issue

The struggle to find enough food is a problem not just at Harvard. Food insecurity on campus is widespread in the United States and elsewhere, with one study reporting that 42% of US undergraduate students on average are unable to feed themselves what they need to stay healthy ( B. Ellison et al. Food Policy 102 , 102031; 2021 ). To lessen the struggle faced by hungry students, some 750 campuses across the United States have set up food pantries. Research is lacking on food-access issues affecting UK graduate students and postdocs, but a study of 161 UK universities found that food insecurity was “off the scales”, says developmental psychologist Greta Defeyter, who led the work, which is yet to be published. It affected 57% of first-year undergraduate and foundation-year students.

Postdocs celebrate 24% pay boost in one of the world’s most expensive cities

Food insecurity affected 20% of PhD students, “which is much higher than the UK average” of 6–10% of the general population, says Defeyter, who directs the Healthy Living Lab, a food-poverty research group based at Northumbria University in Newcastle.

A 2016 report about food insecurity at the ten campuses of the University of California (UC) system found that 25% of graduate students and 48% of undergraduates didn’t have enough to eat (see go.nature.com/49dedjx ).

“We started producing the data to go to the state and say, we have a problem and we need to do something about it,” said Suzanna Martinez, a health-behaviour epidemiologist at UC San Francisco. Martinez led the research in her previous role at the university’s Nutrition Policy Institute in Oakland, California. “Since 2016, the UC system has published updates on food insecurity and actions to address it on its campuses,” she adds. These reports can be accessed online through the university’s Basic Needs Initiative (see go.nature.com/4begaus ).

Social stigma

As well as lowering academic performance and increasing the risk of depression, food insecurity is associated with social stigma.

Gwen Chodur, now a postdoc in nutritional biology at UC Santa Cruz, was a key player in the fight for food security while a graduate student in nutrition at the UC Davis. Chodur’s monthly pay in 2016, her first year as a graduate student, was just under $1,700. A first-generation university student who hailed from ‘coal country’ in Pennsylvania, she often skipped lunch as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Despite taking on a couple of jobs while there, she says, “I was always one unanticipated expense away from not being able to finish my degree.”

When she started at UC Davis in September 2016, she explains, she didn’t get her first cheque until November, which forced her to get creative with dried beans and rice, or stock up on cans of spaghetti hoops for dinner. “It was very clear to me that higher education wasn’t designed for students like me, and that was very obvious from the first day that I set foot on campus,” she says of the deep-seated sense of impostor syndrome she felt.

PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

Chodur soon learnt that many other graduate students had similar struggles. Bolstered by this knowledge, she joined others to launch a separate food pantry, located in the Graduate Student Association office, for colleagues who felt uncomfortable going to the one on campus. “They were saying things like, ‘If I see my students there, that could undermine my authority in the classroom and it would be embarrassing,’” says Chodur.

Safyer McKenzie-Sampson spoke out about the location of the weekly free food market at UC San Francisco. McKenzie-Sampson, who was then a PhD student researching racism and adverse maternal health outcomes in Black communities, says having access to the market was helpful after spending half of her pay on rent. But a return trip to the food market took one hour from the Mission Bay campus, where she lived and worked. “There’d be a group of us with our big green bags collectively doing the walk of shame to the shuttle bus,” she says. Raising the issue repeatedly with her mentor resulted in a second food market opening at the Mission Bay Campus. “She was able to have the right conversations with the right people,” McKenzie-Sampson says.

Even so, McKenzie-Sampson still did not have enough to eat, and often had to track down free food provided at campus meetings. “I don’t know if you have heard of the example of ‘having sleep for dinner’. Well, there definitely were many nights when I had sleep for dinner,” says McKenzie-Sampson, who is now based at Stanford University in California, where she researches racism and ethnicity. She hails from Canada and, like other international students, would at that time have been ineligible for food stamps provided through the state version of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Legislation introduced in California in 2021 broadened eligibility for food stamps in the state’s undergraduates. But food insecurity in graduate students rose by 14 percentage points between 2021 and 2023, after a fall of 5 percentage points between 2016 and 2021.

“At the end of the day, it’s still the dollar amount that impacts graduate students,” says Martinez, noting that their stipends are too high for them to be eligible for food stamps.

Martinez, who advises on basic necessities operations on UC campuses, also attributes the jump to cost of attendance and increases in the cost of living. She says that the 2023 Basic Needs Initiative survey on food insecurity might have been done before pay hikes for graduate students, which took effect after a long-standing and ultimately successful strike over pay and conditions ended in December 2022. According to the university’s latest report on basic necessities, between 2020 and 2023, the US consumer price index rose by 19% and food prices ratcheted up by 24%.

Meanwhile, researchers at Harvard are in the next phase of investigating food insecurity on campus, taking a deeper dive into the details of how graduate students and postdocs are weathering it and what they need. Nour Hammad, a PhD student who researches public-health nutrition and is lead author of the study, says a food pantry is planned. The research continues, she adds, “to see how food insecurity impacts academic performance, their physical and mental health, their relationships — just their whole experience”.

Until recently, Cruz was part of those efforts as leader of the Harvard Chan Alliance for Low Income and First Generation Students Organization, an advocacy group that campaigns for better food access for students in need and serves more broadly as a support system. Group chats announce where on campus students can find free food — usually leftover pizza, sandwiches and fruit from meetings.

“I would say all of us PhD students have Tupperware containers at our desks, so if there is food, we can take extra home,” says Cruz. On the day she spoke to Nature , she had scored some cooked chicken breasts: “I was like, that’s going to be my protein for the week.”

Nature 629 , 489-490 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01279-y

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80 World Hunger Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best world hunger topic ideas & essay examples, 🎓 simple & easy world hunger essay titles, 🔎 good research topics about world hunger, ❓ questions about world hunger.

• World Hunger Essay: Causes of World Hunger & How to Solve It It is important to note that though the problem of hunger is virtually everywhere in the world, most of the hunger stricken people are found in the developing countries.
• World Hunger: Cause and Effect In this way, the poor nations have to export most of their food to pay these debts. In other cases, most industries that used to offer assistance to these poor nations also center on exports […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Effects of World Hunger Activities of the United States indicate a tendency to increase world hunger; it seems to give the perception that it is fond to bask in the glory of the world’s dependency on foreign aid, so […]
• World Hunger: Causes and Solutions For example, Peter Singer and Garrett Hardin depict the importance of famine and suggest diverse solutions for the cease of the problem in their publications and scientific research.
• What Causes World Hunger? It is, therefore, true enough to state that corrupt and oppressive political systems around the world have contributed a great deal towards the escalation of world hunger.
• Population Growth and World Hunger Links I recommends teachers who teach mathematics to liberal arts to try these teaching strategies and test how the performances of their students will greatly improve.
• Genetically Engineered Food Against World Hunger I support the production of GMFs in large quality; I hold the opinion that they can offer a lasting solution to food problems facing the world.
• Peter Singer in the Solution to World Hunger This paper analyses the topic on world hunger, why the topic is important in the study of ethics, and Peter Singer’s position on what we ought to do to alleviate world hunger.
• World Hunger and Millennium Development Goals The chart below shows the statistics of hunger in the world: The majority of poverty stricken people who happens to be suffering from hunger live in Africa, the Pacific, Caribbean, and Asia.
• Is Genetically Engineered Food the Solution to the World’s Hunger Problems? However, the acceptance of GMO’s as the solution to the world’s food problem is not unanimously and there is still a multitude of opposition and suspicion of their use.
• Genetically Modified Food as a Solution to Ending World Hunger
• World Hunger and Environment: Pressures on Land, Water, and Energy Resources
• Poverty Is the Principal Cause of Global Hunger
• Focus On 24 Vulnerable Countries to Help End World Hunger
• World Hunger Problem: Biological Stress Factors
• Utilitarianism Theory: The Moral Obligation to Help End World Hunger
• The Connection Between Overpopulation and World Hunger: Factors Which Contribute to Hunger
• The focus of the 2021 Ghi: World Hunger and Food Systems in Conflict Settings
• World Hunger and Global Environment in Haiti
• World Hunger’s Problem Needs Resilience to Build Food and Nutrition Security
• Role of Company Zambrero and Mexican Cuisine in Fighting Against World Hunger
• Australian Foreign Aid Projects to Reduce World Hunger and Poverty
• The Clean Meat Movement as the Solution to World Hunger
• Global and Regional Trends in World Hunger
• Development and Strategies for Reducing World Hunger
• The Impact of Animal Agriculture on World Hunger
• World Hunger’s Solutions: Reduced Usage of Land And Teaching Farmers About Effective Land Use
• Myths About World Hunger: Just a Problem of Not Having Enough Food
• World Hunger Effects on Developing Countries: Underweight, Growth Stunted, and Micronutrient Deficiencies
• World Hunger in Africa: Facts, FAQs, and How to Help
• The Challenge of World Hunger and Climate Change
• Forced Migration and World Hunger: Two Closely Intertwined Problems
• Why Rising and Volatile Food Prices Bring World Hunger
• World Hunger: Measures of Child Undernutrition
• World Hunger and the UK Example: Food Prices Being High
• How Politics Subsidize World Hunger
• Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger
• Freerice by WFP: Free Trivia Game That Helps End World Hunger
• Linking Health and Sustainable Food Systems With World Hunger
• The World Hunger and Food Shortages: Conflicts, Wars, Environmental Shocks Such as Flooding or Drought
• World Hunger: Discussion of Cannibalism as a Possible Solution
• The Inequalities of World Hunger: The UN And Their Aim “Leaving No One Behind”
• World Hunger Relief Organizations
• A Decrease in World Hunger With an Increase in Food Production
• Ending World Hunger in Our Time by Food Sovereignty
• No Food, No Morals: The Effects of World Hunger
• Peter Singer in the Solution to World Hunger
• How the Creation of Leaders Brings Inequalities in Rank, Power, Wealth, and Eventually the Creation of World Hunger
• Why the War in Ukraine Has Exacerbated Global Food Insecurity
• Solving World Hunger Through Microenterprises, Policy, and Community Health Workers
• How Does Poverty Cause World Hunger?
• What Are the Main Consequences of World Hunger?
• How Can Micro-Enterprises, Politics and Community Health Workers Solve the Problem of World Hunger?
• What Is the Biggest Problem in the Fight Against Hunger in the World?
• Is World Hunger Caused by Food Waste?
• What Are the Causes and Effects of Hunger in the World?
• How Does Animal Agriculture Contribute to World Hunger?
• What Is the Social Problem of World Hunger?
• How Can the Government Overcome World Hunger?
• Why Is World Hunger a Political Issue?
• Is Hunger Caused by Food Shortages Around the World?
• How Is World Hunger Affecting Haiti?
• What Are the Things That Can Help End World Hunger?
• How Can Genetic Engineering Help Fight World Hunger?
• Is World Hunger a Human Rights Issue?
• What Is the Biggest Contributor to World Hunger?
• How Does Political Instability Cause World Hunger?
• Is World Hunger a Problem of Distribution?
• What Measures Must Be Taken Today to Prevent Future World Hunger?
• Is There a Connection Between Diabetes and World Hunger?
• How Can Gmos End World Hunger?
• Are Overpopulation and World Hunger Related?
• How Is World Hunger Related to Human Rights?
• Does Utilitarianism Theory Claim That It Is Our Moral Duty to Help End World Hunger?
• What Is the Most Effective Way to End World Hunger?
• How Are World Hunger and Poverty in Developing Countries Related?
• Could Food Sovereignty Put an End to World Hunger in Our Time?
• Is Genetically Modified Food the Answer to World Hunger?
• How Does World Hunger Affect the Economy?
• Does the Meat Industry Contribute to World Hunger?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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A REUTERS INVESTIGATION

As famine looms in sudan, the hungry eat soil and leaves.

By By MAGGIE MICHAEL . Visuals by EL TAYEB SIDDIG

Filed April 30, 2024, 11 a.m. GMT

A Reuters Special Report As famine looms in Sudan, the hungry eat soil and leaves

Nearly five million people are close to famine as the country’s civil war passes the one-year mark. Aid officials say the warring parties – the army and the Rapid Support Forces – are looting aid or blocking it from reaching areas where starvation is taking hold. But ‘the world’s largest hunger crisis’ is drawing little global attention.

By MAGGIE MICHAEL

Visuals by EL TAYEB SIDDIG

Filed: April 30, 2024, 11 a.m. GMT

OMDURMAN, Sudan

There is so little food  in some areas of Sudan that people are taking extreme measures to survive.

In the Al Lait refugee camp, they are eating dirt.

The impoverished camp, located in North Darfur, has seen a new influx of displaced people as Sudan’s year-old civil war has brought fighting to large swathes of the country and a campaign of ethnic cleansing to Darfur.

Garang Achien Akok is one of the thousands of new arrivals in the area. Akok, his wife and their five children abandoned their home in the southern region of Kordofan after Arab militiamen on camels stormed their village and torched their hut, he said.

Akok, 41, reached Al Lait in December, but has no work and can’t feed the family. At times, they go two or three days without eating. When that happens, Akok said, he watches helplessly as his wife and children dig holes in the ground with a stick, slide their hands in and grab some soil. Then they roll the soil into a ball, put it in their mouths and swallow it with water.

“I keep telling them not to do it, but it's hunger,” he said. “There is nothing I can do.”

Hunger and starvation are spreading across Sudan, as the war that erupted in April last year between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shows no sign of abating. The outlook is dire, according to interviews with over 160 civilians caught in the fighting and more than 60 aid workers and food security experts, as well as a review of food surveys by aid agencies. Reuters reporters also spent close to a week in Omdurman last month, one of three cities that comprise the capital Khartoum, interviewing people who had suffered severe food shortages.

Parts of Sudan are on the brink of famine – a brewing crisis that is man-made. Agriculture has been ravaged as farmers have had their harvested crops stolen by the RSF and fled their lands due to the violence. Hunger, not just fighting, is now driving displacement as people leave home in search of food. Malaria and other diseases are spreading among the displaced. Key aid hubs have been looted by the RSF and its allied militias. And international aid arriving in Sudan is being blocked by the military from reaching people in areas where starvation has set in.

“Sudan’s war has created the world’s largest hunger crisis,” said Anette Hoffmann, author of a report on the food emergency in Sudan by the Netherlands-based Clingendael think tank. “We will likely see a famine that we haven’t seen in decades.”

The Sudanese army and RSF did not respond to detailed questions for this report. Sudan’s foreign ministry, part of the military-led government, has said it is committed to facilitating the delivery of aid, and has accused the RSF of looting and blocking aid. Lieutenant General Ibrahim Jaber, the military’s second in command, has said that Sudan “will not fall into hunger” and had “more than it needs.” Some Khartoum residents said the army has at times provided limited amounts of food relief amid the fighting.

The RSF has denied looting, saying any rogue actors in its ranks will be held responsible, and has blamed the army for obstructing the delivery of aid.

People across Sudan are taking increasingly desperate measures to survive. In West Darfur, farmers whose lands were plundered by the RSF have eaten the seeds they bought for planting because they have run out of food. In the Kordofan region, people have sold their furniture and clothes to get cash for food. In Khartoum, residents under siege in their homes have picked the leaves off trees and boiled and eaten them.

Almost 18 million people in Sudan – more than a third of the nation’s 49 million people – are facing “high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognized hunger monitor. The IPC also estimates that of this group, nearly five million people are one step from famine. Immediate action is needed to “prevent widespread death and total collapse of livelihoods and avert a catastrophic hunger crisis in Sudan,” the IPC said in March. The group added that it has been unable to update a projection it made in December because of data gaps in conflict areas and internet and phone outages in much of Sudan.

The Clingendael report has drawn three possible scenarios for Sudan. The most optimistic one projected that 6% of the population will face famine. In the worst case, 40% of people would endure famine during the lean season between harvests, which starts in May and runs to September.

In some places, people are already dying. Doctors Without Borders has reported that an estimated one child is dying on average every two hours in the vast Zamzam displaced persons camp in North Darfur – a result of disease and malnutrition.

Hunger’s widening reach

Regions across Sudan face increasingly dire food shortages, hunger monitors warn

Source: Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET); Natural Earth. Definition of famine: “Households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident. (For Famine Classification, area needs to have extreme critical levels of acute malnutrition and mortality.)”

Despite the deepening food crisis, the situation in Sudan has drawn less international scrutiny than other humanitarian emergencies in places such as Ukraine and Gaza. Some observers have called Sudan’s conflict “the forgotten war.”

“Our biggest challenge is the funding and lack of attention to Sudan,” said Chessa Latifi, senior program advisor in global health at relief organization Project HOPE. “People are so involved in Ukraine and so involved in Gaza that there is no space for anyone to think, to be open to listen and hear about Sudan.”

International pressure on the warring parties has failed so far to break the aid logjam. Isobel Coleman, deputy administrator of USAID, the U.S. government relief agency, said Sudanese army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo were responsible for aid not reaching people.

“This looming threat of famine hangs on them,” she told Reuters. “People are literally dying by the day because of lack of access to food and other essentials.”

Some aid officials and food experts have expressed concern over the delay by the IPC, the hunger monitor, in issuing its latest appraisal of the food crisis in Sudan.

By the time the IPC releases its new analysis, Clingendael’s Hoffman said, it would be “too late to deliver aid and save lives.” She said the IPC should declare that there is a risk of famine.

While a famine alert carries no binding obligations on the UN or governments, it does serve to focus world attention on a crisis situation and galvanize the resources needed to provide emergency aid. Generally, a decision to declare a famine is made by a government and the UN.

Fatima Eltahir, the IPC chair in Sudan, who is a government official, said there has been no delay in issuing the group’s analysis and that it would be released in May.

Starving in Khartoum

The deprivation is not confined to the poor. Even before the war, Sudan was facing widespread poverty and rising hunger. Now, Sudan has become the largest displacement crisis, with one in every eight internally displaced persons worldwide, the United Nations says. And the economy has been shattered by the fighting, affecting everyone.

Nearly half the population is unemployed, according to the International Monetary Fund. The formal banking system has collapsed, leaving people without access to money. A telecommunications blackout has deprived people of a key lifeline in the form of online money transfers. According to Jibril Ibrahim, Sudan’s finance minister, the economy has contracted by 40% because of the war.

In middle class neighborhoods of Khartoum, life has become a daily battle for survival, defined by hunger and fear, as people find themselves pincered between the military and the RSF.

For Lina Mohammed Hassan and her family, starvation set in slowly.

After the war broke out last year, mortars rained down around Hassan’s home in the Banat neighborhood of Omdurman. There were days when the shelling would start at 5 a.m. and last all day, said the 32-year-old Hassan. Venturing outside to look for food became risky.

The RSF laid siege to areas across the capital like Banat located near Sudanese army bases, in an effort to squeeze troops trying to hold off advances by the paramilitary. Food began to vanish. Markets were destroyed in the fighting. Residents said people ran out of cash after Khartoum’s banks were looted by RSF militiamen, who made off with piles of banknotes and gold. The RSF has denied it was involved in the looting.

Soon, Hassan and her extended family of 11 were surviving largely on a diet of lentils and rice. “Even that was hard to get because prices were five times the normal rate,” she said.

By November, RSF forces had cut off electricity and severed the main water pipeline to Banat, residents said. Soldiers from a nearby army base and civilians began hunting cats to eat. Women carrying food were searched at RSF checkpoints, accused of supporting the army, beaten and sexually assaulted, Hassan said.

Food packages airdropped by the army into the neighborhood made little difference. “The packages broke up when they hit the ground,” she said. “The food mixed together with the dust.” Over time, “it became impossible to get anything, cash or food.”

Hassan said soldiers sometimes shared their food with the children in her family, but the relief was limited. She and the other adults began skipping meals, sometimes for two days straight, so the children could eat. Tree leaves boiled in water and sprinkled with spices became a part of their diet.

“We tried to avoid picking the leaves from poisonous trees,” she said. “We only used the mango, lemon and guava leaves. The children would eat them. They couldn’t say no because they were so hungry.”

In late February, after the army made advances in Banat, Hassan and her family were able to flee to another part of Omdurman under control of the Sudanese military. She spoke to Reuters last month in an apartment there.

People still remain trapped in more than a dozen districts across Khartoum. A global authority on food insecurity, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, reported in March that areas in the capital are at “risk of famine” as the warring parties have “employed siege-like tactics to cut off supplies to their opponent.”

No haven from hunger

Many of the families who were trapped in the capital told Reuters they wanted to flee but were deterred by stories they’d heard of women being raped and young men being detained and killed by RSF forces.

A 24-year-old resident of Banat decided she had no choice but to try escaping when a doctor told her in November that her three-year-old son might not survive if they stayed.

The woman said she had been feeding her son a few spoons of chickpeas a day for months, while she was pregnant and skipping meals. After she had a baby girl, she was unable to breastfeed and could only find expired formula to feed her newborn. Her boy had developed a blood deficiency and was vomiting repeatedly, she said.

On the way out of Banat, she had to pass through RSF-controlled checkpoints. Militiamen looking for cash and gold jewelry beat her with whips and ran their hands over her body as they searched her, she said. Some women were forced to strip naked. Soldiers raped a woman in front of her, she said. A neighbor who escaped with her corroborated the account.

“I saw women dragged to empty buildings,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They groped me, three or four times along the way.”

When the family finally reached an army-controlled area in Omdurman, “we collapsed,” the woman said. “We were very hungry, we were sick and dehydrated. So hungry that we couldn't eat a lot.”

Residents in Omdurman, one of three cities that make up the capital Khartoum, line up to receive food in March. The war has decimated the economy, with almost half of the population unemployed, according to the International Monetary Fund. REUTERS/El Tayeb Siddig

Even those who have escaped the fighting to the army-controlled area of Omdurman say they have little to eat, because they’re out of work and the available food in the markets is exorbitantly expensive. Teachers, lawyers and pharmacists were among those who repeatedly lined up in March in front of large cooking pots filled with beans and lentils to get what might be their only meal of the day.

Fatma Saleh, a pharmacist, said she stands for hours in a queue to get three scoops of lentils or beans for her family of four, including her sick mother. “I cried hard,” she said, describing the first time she stood in line for food. She said she sold her clothes to get cash to buy food.

Sahar Moussa, who fled with her husband and three children, says she lived a comfortable life in Khartoum before the war. Her husband made a good living as a mechanical engineer.

When her children tell her they’re hungry, she tells them their father is coming with food, even though she knows he isn’t. “Sometimes I just wish a shell would kill me so I don't have to see my children crying from hunger,” she said.

Port Sudan is now the hub for all aid since the government and aid agencies relocated there after the RSF seized much of Khartoum. Even so, displaced people face malnutrition and disease in the coastal city. According to the UN, since the start of the war nearly a quarter of a million people have fled to the Red Sea state, of which Port Sudan is the capital. Dozens of schools have been turned into shelters for displaced people.

At the Al Shahinat displaced persons camp in Port Sudan, sewage flowed openly when a reporter visited last month. Children with stomachs bloated from malnutrition could be seen walking around. Some were barefoot, with streaks down their legs from diarrhea.

Looting the ‘food of the people’

Chaos in Sudan’s breadbasket regions is ravaging the national food supply. A March report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) showed Sudan had a 46% drop in cereal production in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The harvest is being plundered in El Gezira, a region south of the capital that accounts for over half of Sudan’s wheat production. That is impoverishing farmers and crippling their ability to finance the planting of new crops.

Khaled Mostafa, a farmer in El Gezira state, planted about 10 acres of corn and lentils in his fields last year. He was planning to sell the produce after the harvest in the local market to settle his debts and cover expenses for the next planting season.

But in February, RSF members stormed his home, shoved him to the ground and put a knife to his neck, he said. They forced him to hand over his entire harvest – 110 sacks of corn and lentils. They also made off with trucks and other equipment, he said.

Mostafa’s story has played out in dozens of villages across El Gezira since the RSF launched its assault on the state in December, according to testimonies from multiple residents. Farmers described how men in RSF uniforms riding in pick-up trucks and on motorbikes went house to house assaulting people, stripping them of their possessions and forcing them at gunpoint to carry their harvested crops to RSF vehicles.

As they plundered the villages, the militiamen destroyed solar panels used to power generators that helped draw water from deep wells. Fuel for powering flour mills was also stolen, farmers said, leaving villagers without any means of grinding grains to make flour for Aseeda porridge, a staple of the Sudanese diet.

“This all leads to hunger,” said Mostafa. “This is the food of the people. They stole it.”

Farmers said their assailants, though often wearing RSF uniforms, didn’t seem to be part of a clear chain of command. They operated, vigilante style, in small cells of about 20 people, each with its own leader. The RSF has also imposed a travel tax in places like Darfur and El Gezira, forcing farmers to pay a levy as they move around.

The “unprecedented” damage caused to farming by RSF attacks in El Gezira will affect the next harvest, said Ahmed Omar, who represents a group of farmers in the state. “There is nothing left in El Gezira to start the new season. No farmers, no machinery.”

Other crucial cereal producing regions that are largely under RSF control, including Darfur and Kordofan, are suffering similar output declines. Immediate action is required to “prevent widespread death related to hunger and the collapse of livelihoods,” said Rein Paulsen, the FAO’s director of emergencies and resilience.

The fighting has also destroyed flour mills, food factories and ranches.

The only factory in Sudan making therapeutic food for children suffering from malnutrition was destroyed in the fighting. The plant burned down after being hit by a shell in May last year, said Nada Yagoub, the deputy manager of Samil and daughter of the factory owner.

All production of the product, which treats wasting in small children, has since been halted. Samil used to produce 60% of this therapeutic food for children in Sudan, according to UNICEF, the UN children’s agency.

“It’s a huge loss at a time when famine is coming,” Yagoub said.

As hunger grips more and more Sudanese, international aid agencies are struggling to get food and medicines to areas where people are sick and starving.

It can take up to 40 days for an aid truck to reach Darfur from Port Sudan in the east, where most of the aid is stored, according to Justin Brady, the Sudan head of OCHA, the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. This includes delays for “obtaining necessary travel permissions,” he said. Aid vehicles have to traverse multiple areas controlled by different groups, including the RSF, criminal gangs and tribesmen.

Since December, aid from the east has failed to reach much of Darfur, the Kordofan region or Khartoum, aid workers say. And only a few dozen trucks have come in via Chad in the west.

Overall, humanitarian assistance has reached only 16% of people who need it, according to a survey conducted late last year by Humanitarian Outcomes, a group that advises aid agencies and donor governments.

Aid officials say the Sudanese army has made it increasingly difficult to get food and medical supplies to areas where they are most needed. In response to RSF appeals for agencies to deliver aid to areas under its control, army chief Burhan said in February: “This will not happen until we end this war and defeat these criminal rebels.”

“Aid is not allowed to go from SAF to RSF,” said Mohammed Qazilbash, Sudan director for humanitarian group Plan International, using the acronym for the Sudanese Armed Forces. “Food is being used as a weapon of war.”

Reuters reported in late February that the army had issued an order prohibiting aid deliveries through Chad into Darfur. The military-led government later said that a humanitarian corridor into North Darfur was open. But Qazilbash told Reuters in late March that the amount of assistance moving through the North Darfur route was “a trickle.”

Since the start of the war, the military-led government has put in place a thicket of bureaucratic rules that are severely hampering food distribution, dozens of aid officials told Reuters. The government formed new committees to handle aid that have overlapping powers with the Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC), the government’s main aid arm. The move has caused confusion and delays as approvals are now needed from multiple departments, according to humanitarian officials.

It took World Vision, a relief agency, four months to secure the required signatures and stamps from authorities to allow the organization to open a cholera treatment center in El Gezira, following reports of an outbreak there. “I fear that we lost children and mothers to cholera while waiting for the paperwork to be done,” said Geoffrey Babughirana, health and nutrition manager at World Vision.

The cholera center finally opened in December – but was operational for just six days. On the seventh day, the RSF and its allied militias stormed Wad Madani, the capital of El Gezira, and all aid agencies were forced to evacuate.

“It was devastating when we left,” said Babughirana.

Aid agencies have also been pressed to hire local government employees to oversee work done by the agencies, such as food assessment surveys, humanitarian officials said. One agency was forced to hire a HAC team and pay them salaries during a needs assessment survey in River Nile state, which is controlled by the Sudanese military, an official from that agency said. “We are paying money that we shouldn’t be paying,” the official said.

Food supplies in major aid hubs like El Gezira have also been looted, largely by RSF forces, aid officials said.

When the RSF invaded El Gezira in December, UN officials gave the paramilitary’s commanders the coordinates of warehouses where thousands of metric tons of aid were being stored – enough to feed close to 1.5 million people for a month in the state. They shared the locations in the hope that the aid would be protected and received assurances from the RSF that it would, said Brady, the Sudan director for OCHA.

But almost all the aid in the warehouse was stolen. And what remained couldn’t be accessed by the agency that distributes it, the UN World Food Program, because of the fighting, said Eddie Rowe, the WFP’s director for Sudan.

Ezzaddean Elsafi, an RSF advisor, denied that the paramilitary had looted aid warehouses, saying this was a “media exaggeration.”

The rainy season in Sudan is also approaching, which will make roads impassable and entire areas in places like Darfur and Kordofan inaccessible, Rowe said. “We are in a race against time.”

Death in Darfur

Al Lait camp, where people have been eating dirt, is just one of a cluster of 13 refugee camps in a remote area of North Darfur where inhabitants have resorted to consuming soil and tree leaves, according to residents, medics and aid workers who spoke to Reuters by phone.

The original inhabitants of the camps are refugees from South Sudan who fled conflict and hunger. They have now been joined by thousands of displaced Sudanese fleeing the fighting.

Faisal Mohammed, who works for the Sahari Organization for Development, a local aid group, said he had a hard time believing people were eating soil until he saw it himself in several camps. “When the stomach is empty, people try to fill it with anything,” he said.

“We will likely see a famine that we haven’t seen in decades.” Anette Hoffmann, author of a report on the food emergency in Sudan

Children who’ve been eating soil have been vomiting and getting diarrhea, multiple residents told Reuters.

Before the war, the camp’s residents worked on farms and were paid in harvested crops, getting 20% of the yield. They also relied heavily on aid from the World Food Program. But as the fighting spread, humanitarian aid was blocked. And farmers, squeezed by the spiraling costs of fertilizers and insecticides and a lack of financing, cut back on the areas they planted, depriving farm laborers of their jobs.

Today, some of the women work in a nearby town washing clothes. They make up to a dollar a day – enough to buy flour and sugar to make a pudding called Madeeda.

When there is no work, they don’t eat, residents said.

While there is food in nearby markets, prices have skyrocketed during the war, making much of it inaccessible to camp residents. A plate of beans costs six times what it did before the war.

In mid-April, after a year without food assistance, eight aid trucks from the WFP arrived in the area carrying cereals, oil and flour.

It isn’t enough. Malnutrition and disease are killing people, residents said.

Achek Kuol Ngor, a 30-year-old South Sudanese woman from the Abu Jarra camp, said her twins died just 12 days after she gave birth to them in May last year. Asked how they died, she replied: “Sick and hungry.”

She was malnourished and unable to breastfeed them, and had no baby formula, she said. A medical assistant who was present when the twins died at a hospital in a nearby town confirmed Ngor’s account.

Lual Deng Majok, another resident of Abu Jarra, said his family started eating tree leaves after they ran out of money late last year. When his son David, 17, started vomiting and developed a fever, Majok put him in a cart and traveled four hours to a hospital where doctors diagnosed the teen with malaria. Malnourished people are more likely to develop severe cases of the disease. Two days later, his son was dead, Majok said. He put the boy’s body in the cart and took him back to the camp to bury him.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm the cause of death for Ngor’s and Majok’s children.

In North Darfur’s Zamzam camp, where Doctors Without Borders found high mortality rates among children, the situation continues to deteriorate. The camp is now home to at least half a million people.

A survey conducted there earlier this month by Doctors Without Borders found that nearly a third of children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, according to Jerome Tubiana, an adviser to the organization on refugee issues. Eight percent of these children “are at risk of dying within three to six weeks if they don’t get immediate treatment,” he told Reuters.

Zakariya Ali, a doctor there, said he commonly sees “three or four cases of severely malnourished children” a day, and typically, “one of them falls dead.”

As Ali spoke with a reporter by phone, a 9-month-old baby girl named Mawaheb was brought into the clinic. Ali gave her a quick test for malnutrition, placing a measuring tape around her mid-upper arm to gauge its circumference.

He shared a photo of the result. Mawaheb’s arm was so thin, she placed in the red zone: severe acute malnourishment, at risk of death.

Starving in Sudan

By Maggie Michael

Photography and Video by El Tayeb Siddig

Additional reporting: Ryan McNeill

Graphics: Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa

Photo editing: Edgar Su

Art direction: Catherine Tai

Edited by Peter Hirschberg

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Parts of Gaza Are in Famine, World Food Program Chief Says

The remarks by Cindy McCain do not constitute an official declaration of famine, but she said the assessment was based on “what we have seen” on the ground.

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By Liam Stack

• May 4, 2024

The director of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, says that parts of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a “full-blown famine” that is rapidly spreading throughout the territory after almost seven months of war.

Ms. McCain is the second high-profile American leading a U.S. government or U.N. aid effort who has said that there is famine in northern Gaza, although her remarks do not constitute an official declaration, which is a complex bureaucratic process.

“There is famine — full-blown famine in the north, and it’s moving its way south,” Ms. McCain said in excerpts released on Friday of an interview with “Meet the Press .” The interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked Ms. McCain to repeat herself.

“What you are saying is significant,” Ms. Welker said. “You are saying there is full-blown famine in northern Gaza?”

“Yes, I am,” Ms. McCain replied. “Yes, I am.”

The first American official to say there was famine in Gaza during the conflict was Samantha Power, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who made her remarks in congressional testimony last month.

Ms. McCain was appointed by President Biden as the American ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture in 2021 and became head of the W.F.P., a U.N. agency, last year.

An official declaration of famine typically involves both the United Nations and the government of the country where the famine is taking place, and it is unclear what local authority might have the power to do that in Gaza.

In the interview, Ms. McCain did not explain why an official famine declaration has not been made. But she said her assessment was “based on what we have seen and what we have experienced on the ground.”

“It is horror,” she said. “It is so hard to look at, and it is so hard to hear, also. I am so hoping we can get a cease-fire and begin to feed these people, especially in the north, in a much faster fashion.”

Gaza has been gripped by what experts have called a severe human-made hunger crisis as a result of Israeli bombardment and restrictions that have made delivering aid to the territory extremely challenging. The amount of aid entering Gaza has increased recently, but aid groups say it is far from adequate.

For the first several weeks of the war, Israel maintained what it called a “complete siege” of Gaza, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into the territory. The Israeli military also destroyed Gaza’s port , restricted fishing and bombed many of its farms.

Israel eventually loosened that siege but instituted a meticulous inspection process that it says is necessary to ensure that supplies do not fall into the hands of Hamas. Aid groups and foreign diplomats have said the inspections create bottlenecks , and have accused Israel of using them to turn away aid for spurious reasons , including water filters, solar lights and medical kits that contain scissors.

Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, said in a statement last month that Israel’s policies regarding aid in Gaza could amount to a war crime.

Israel has faced increasing pressure in recent weeks to allow aid into Gaza after its military killed seven international aid workers from World Central Kitchen in an airstrike.

Liam Stack is a Times reporter covering the Israel-Hamas war from Jerusalem. More about Liam Stack

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Middle East crisis — explained

The conflict between Israel and Palestinians — and other groups in the Middle East — goes back decades. These stories provide context for current developments and the history that led up to them.

Senior UN official says northern Gaza is now in 'full-blown famine'

The Associated Press

Soldiers assigned to the 7th Transportation Brigade and sailors attached to the MV Roy P. Benavidez assemble a floating pier off the shore of Gaza on April 26, 2024. The U.S. expects to have on-the-ground arrangements in Gaza ready for humanitarian workers to start delivering aid this month via a new U.S.-backed sea route. U.S. Army via AP hide caption

Soldiers assigned to the 7th Transportation Brigade and sailors attached to the MV Roy P. Benavidez assemble a floating pier off the shore of Gaza on April 26, 2024. The U.S. expects to have on-the-ground arrangements in Gaza ready for humanitarian workers to start delivering aid this month via a new U.S.-backed sea route.

WASHINGTON — A top U.N. official said Friday that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in "full-blown famine" after more than six months of war between Israel and Hamas and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.

Cindy McCain, the American director of the U.N. World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine.

"It's horror," McCain told NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview to air Sunday. "There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it's moving its way south."

She said a cease-fire and a greatly increased flow of aid through land and sea routes was essential to confronting the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, home to 2.3 million people.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which controls entrance into Gaza and says it is beginning to allow in more food and other humanitarian aid through land crossings.

The panel that serves as the internationally recognized monitor for food crises said in March that northern Gaza was on the brink of famine and likely to experience it in May. Since March, northern Gaza had not received anything like the aid needed to stave off famine, a U.S. Agency for International Development humanitarian official for Gaza told The Associated Press. The panel's next update will not come before this summer.

The USAID official said on-the-ground preparations for a new U.S.-led sea route were on track to bring in more food — including treatment for hundreds of thousands of starving children — by early or mid-May. That's when the American military expects to finish building a floating pier to receive the shipments.

Israel will invade Gaza's Rafah 'with or without' a hostage deal, Netanyahu says

Ramping up the delivery of aid on the planned U.S.-backed sea route will be gradual as aid groups test the distribution and security arrangements for relief workers, the USAID official said.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns accompanying the official's work on conflicts. They were some of the agency's first comments on the status of preparations for the Biden administration's $320 million Gaza pier project, for which USAID is helping coordinate on-the-ground security and distribution.

At a factory in rural Georgia on Friday, USAID Administrator Samantha Power pointed to the food crises in Gaza and other parts of the world as she announced a $200 million investment aimed at increasing production of emergency nutritional paste for starving children under 5.

Power spoke to factory workers, peanut farmers and local dignitaries sitting among pallets of the paste at the Mana nonprofit in Fitzgerald. It is one of two factories in the U.S. that produces the nutritional food, which is used in clinical settings and made from ground peanuts, powdered milk, sugar and oil, ready to eat in plastic pouches resembling large ketchup packets.

World Central Kitchen says it will resume operations in Gaza

"This effort, this vision meets the moment," Power said. "And it could not be more timely, more necessary or more important."

Under pressure from the U.S. and others, Israeli officials in recent weeks have begun slowly reopening some border crossings for relief shipments.

But aid coming through the sea route, once it's operational, still will serve only a fraction — half a million people — of those who need help in Gaza. Aid organizations including USAID stress that getting more aid through border crossings is essential to staving off famine.

Children under 5 are among the first to die when wars, droughts or other disasters curtail food. Hospital officials in northern Gaza reported the first deaths from hunger in early March and said most of the dead were children.

Power said the U.N. has called for 400 metric tons of the nutritional paste "in light of the severe hunger that is pervading across Gaza right now, and the severe, acute humanitarian crisis." USAID expects to provide a quarter of that, she said.

Globally, she said at the Georgia factory, the treatment made there "will save untold lives, millions of lives."

USAID is coordinating with the World Food Program and other humanitarian partners and governments on security and distribution for the pier project, while U.S. military forces finish building it. President Joe Biden, under pressure to do more to ease the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as the U.S. provides military support for Israel, announced the project in early March.

U.S. Central Command said in a statement Friday that offshore assembly of the floating pier has been temporarily paused due to high winds and sea swells, which caused unsafe conditions for soldiers. The partially built pier and the military vessels involved have gone to Israel's Port of Ashdod, where the work will continue.

A U.S. official said the high seas will delay the installation for several days, possibly until later next week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operation details, said the pause could last longer if the bad weather continues because military personnel and divers have to get into the water for the final installation.

The struggles this week with the first aid delivery through a newly reopened land corridor into north Gaza underscored the uncertainty about security and the danger still facing relief workers. Israeli settlers blocked the convoy before it crossed Wednesday. Once inside Gaza, the convoy was commandeered by Hamas militants, before U.N. officials reclaimed it.

In Gaza, the nutritional treatment for starving children is most urgently needed in the northern part of the Palestinian territory. Civilians have been cut off from most aid supplies, bombarded by Israeli airstrikes and driven into hiding by fighting.

Acute malnutrition rates there among children under 5 have surged from 1% before the war to 30% five months later, the USAID official said. The official called it the fastest such climb in hunger in recent history, more than in grave conflicts and food shortages in Somalia or South Sudan.

One of the few medical facilities still operating in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan hospital, is besieged by parents bringing in thousands of children with malnutrition for treatment, the official said. Aid officials believe many more starving children remain unseen and in need, with families unable to bring them through fighting and checkpoints for care.

Saving the gravely malnourished children in particular requires both greatly increased deliveries of aid and sustained calm in fighting, the official said, so that aid workers can set up treatment facilities around the territory and families can safely bring children in for the sustained treatment needed.