Exodus From Hunger (4 page)

Deborah sleeps with several men. They give her a meal and a bed. The lacy white blouse was a gift from one of them. Deborah knows that the prevalence of HIV and AIDS in Uganda makes sex very dangerous, but she doesn’t always insist on a condom. That puts her on track to an early death.

Deborah is one of the world’s 1 billion hungry people, beaten down by undernutrition and many other deprivations.

I live in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC—far away from Uganda. One of my sons was once friends with a boy named Jack. Jack was small for his age. Over dinner at our house one night, Jack told me he was worried that he wasn’t growing properly. When he and my son decided to get together, Jack always wanted to come to our house, because we had food for snacks.

Jack’s parents were immigrants from Portugal. His father had kidney disease and needed dialysis twice a week. Jack’s mother was a waitress. She worked part-time jobs at two restaurants. She had managed to get the family into subsidized housing.

She had tried to get food stamps too, but the help her family could get from food stamps was too meager to justify the long waits required at the local food stamp office. I called the office repeatedly, and they didn’t answer their phone, presumably because the staff was busy with clients. I did manage to get my church to help with the family’s overdue utility bills.

Then Jack’s father died, and his mother decided to return to Portugal, leaving Jack behind. Jack moved in with the family of a school friend. It is a large African American family, with more heart than wallet. Last time I saw Jack, he was working at our local Baskin-Robbins. He had dropped out of high school.

Jack is one of 49 million people in the United States who live in households that sometimes run out of food. He is not as desperately deprived as Deborah, but he has always been poor and sometimes hungry.

Hunger kills more young children than any disease. One child dies every three seconds in developing countries, and undernutrition contributes to at least a third of these deaths. Little children are weakened by chronic hunger, so they often die of simple maladies such as measles or diarrhea. Many of the undernourished children who survive never realize their physical or intellectual potential.
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Hunger hurts adults, too. Undernourished adults lack energy and are less productive than they could be.

The usual measure of hunger in developing countries is undernutrition. Undernourished people do not get enough food to provide their bodies with the calories they need. They certainly can’t afford a diet that would give them the vitamins and minerals that would keep them healthy.

Undernourished families suffer other deprivations of extreme poverty. They drink water from unsanitary sources. Their bodies are weakened by untreated disease. They don’t know how to write or add, which makes planning ahead and smart farming difficult. They live in huts that don’t fully protect them from the elements.

Women and girls typically suffer most. They have the least education. They work long hours. They walk miles each day with heavy loads of water and firewood. In many cultures they wait to eat until after the men and boys have had their fill.

Of the 1.4 billion people in the world in extreme poverty, almost three-fourths live in Asia (mainly in South Asia, Indonesia, and China). Another fourth live in Africa, and the rest are scattered across other developing countries.
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African poverty has received a lot of international attention, because most of Africa’s people are poor, and for several decades nearly all of Africa was sinking deeper into poverty.

I worked for the World Bank before coming to Bread for the World. The World Bank is an intergovernmental organization that finances development projects and provides policy analysis to developing countries. I helped get the Bank more interested in listening to poor people. A colleague there, Deepa Narayan, initiated a major program of listening to the poor. Her first study,
Voices of the Poor
, was based on interviews with forty-one thousand poor people in fifty developing countries. Poor people everywhere talked about hunger as a defining characteristic of poverty. Many poor people also talked about powerlessness and violence in their lives. Poor women are more likely to suffer wife beating. Poor people are manipulated and defrauded by businesses, government officials, and even people who run charities. They are vulnerable to thieves and thugs, and they don’t trust police. Poor people are also more likely to suffer from large-scale violence, since poor countries are more prone to civil war.
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Deepa’s second study,
Moving Out of Poverty
, based on another massive round of conversations in developing countries, stresses the entrepreneurship and optimism of poor people. A young girl in West Bengal spoke for many when she said, “I can perform any work if I try.” Many people climb out of poverty, and the many others who are driven into poverty (often by illness) typically express determination to recover. “If you fall ten times, you have to stand up ten times,” said Graciela, a fifty-three-year-old refugee in Colombia.
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In the United States, hunger and poverty are not as severe as in poor parts of the globe, but they are still scandalously widespread and damaging. A longtime Bread for the World staff member, Barbara Howell, helped convince the U.S. government to start measuring hunger in this country. The Census Bureau now conducts annual surveys, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analyzes the data.

A total of 49 million people live in households that are food insecure. The USDA divides them into two categories: “very low food security” and “low food security.” About 17 million people live in households that suffer very low food security. Their eating patterns are regularly disrupted because they don’t have enough money for food. They cut portion sizes and skip meals, sometimes going a day or more without eating. Until 2006 the government rightly called this “hunger.” But some officials wanted more precise and less emotive terminology, so they now call it “very low food security.”

Another 32 million live in households that suffer “low food security.” These families struggle to put food on the table. They usually find ways to make ends meet, but sometimes have to skip meals or reduce portion sizes.
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A common pattern among food-insecure households is that the family runs out of food before the end of the month. SNAP benefits (food stamps) are renewed at the beginning of the month, and SNAP benefits are not enough to pay for food for the entire month. Some workers also get wage checks at the start of the month. As food runs low toward the end of the month, the mother typically stops eating properly first in order to protect her children. During the last days of the month, the children also have to skip meals. They go to school in the morning with no breakfast and may also go to bed hungry.

Obesity has also become a big problem in the United States. Two-thirds of adults and one-sixth of children are now overweight or obese. Obesity is a problem among all income groups, but food insecurity contributes to obesity among low-income people. Food-insecure families eat cheap food rather than good food, and food that is high in fat and calories tends to be less expensive.
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An especially high rate of obesity among some groups of poor women may be linked to the fact that they periodically go without food so that their children can eat. When SNAP benefits or the paycheck arrives, these mothers may overeat to make up for days of not eating.
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Food insecurity does its worst damage to children. When the body doesn’t get enough nutrition, the brain isn’t fully alert. Children are designed to be learning machines, but a preschool child in a food-insecure family cannot be as curious as God means her to be. Schoolchildren who aren’t getting enough to eat can’t concentrate. They fidget and misbehave. The intellectual and personal development of children in chronically food-insecure households is likely to be permanently stunted. As they grow into teenagers and adults, they are more likely to have problems with addiction, drop out of school, have babies out of wedlock, and get in trouble with the law.

Nearly one in four children in the United States—22.5 percent as of December 2008—lives in a food-insecure household.
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God, forgive us.

The statistical connections between food deprivation, health problems, and how well children do in school are well documented. Dr. Larry Brown at Harvard University estimates that widespread hunger in the United States costs our society at least $90 billion a year.
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While most of the people who are food insecure are white, more than a quarter of African Americans and Hispanics live in food-insecure households.
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Hungry people live in every city and state in the country, with especially high rates of hunger in pockets of poverty such as the Mississippi River Delta and Native American reservations.

U.S. hunger is interconnected with poverty and related social ills: unemployment and low wages, lack of education, inadequate health care, racial discrimination, the strains on marriage in our society, substance abuse, crime, violence, high rates of imprisonment, and homelessness. Actions to address these problems also reduce hunger, and tackling hunger helps to resolve these other problems.

Children in single-parent families are much more likely to be poor, and the number of children in single-parent families has skyrocketed since the 1970s.
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Whatever we can do to reduce the number of children born outside marriage, as well as the divorce rate, will help reduce childhood hunger. At the same time, policies that boost the incomes of poor and near-poor parents will reduce the exceptional stress on their marriages.
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The best, most durable way to reduce hunger and poverty is employment. A good job puts food on the table, includes health insurance for the family, and allows for savings and educational opportunities that can make the family secure. When hungry and poor people are asked what would help them most, they almost always talk about employment, wages, or training that would allow them to earn more money.

Most Americans are vulnerable to poverty. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, so an illness or divorce can be financial disaster. Economist Rebecca Blank studied poverty over a thirteen-year period; she found that one-tenth of all Americans were poor during most of that time, but one-third of all Americans were poor for at least a year.
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Nearly two-thirds of Americans qualify for one of the government programs that help low-income people at some point in their lives.
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The global economy delivered a harsh blow to hundreds of millions of very poor people even before the U.S. financial system went into crisis. The prices of the basic grains on which poor people in developing countries depend—rice, wheat, corn, or sorghum—doubled between 2006 and 2008. Prices have come down since then, but they still remain higher than before.

Grain prices are expected to stay high.
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The many people in China, India, and other developing countries who have escaped from hunger over the last couple of decades are eating more and eating some meat. This is wonderful, but it puts upward pressure on prices. In addition, the promotion of biofuels in the United States and other countries diverts some land use from producing food to producing fuel.

The global financial crisis and global economic slowdown have also caused hardship around the world. Developing countries have lost exports and investments, and migrants to richer countries no longer have as much money to send home. These economic problems have added to hunger and poverty.

In this country, high food and fuel prices combined with the mortgage crisis, tight credit, and high unemployment to increase hunger and poverty.

Mortgage problems among borrowers who were only marginally creditworthy triggered the Wall Street crisis of late 2008. A 2007 Bread for the World Institute report focused on exploitative financial practices in low-income communities, including the promotion of subprime mortgages to families for whom they could spell disaster.
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But we didn’t anticipate the risk that exploitative lending posed to the whole financial system. Wall Street institutions bought up risky mortgages and repackaged them in complicated ways. As the vulnerability of huge investment houses such as Lehman Brothers became clear, consumers and businesses in the United States and worldwide lost confidence in the economy. We all cut back on spending, and the global economy contracted.

Millions of people lost their jobs, and finding a job became much more difficult. During a past recession, President Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently—from his own family’s experience—about the pain of unemployment:

Recently I preached at a social-justice revival among African American churches in Martinsville, Virginia. This southern Virginia town was a center of textile and furniture manufacturing, but most of its factories closed in the face of competition from developing countries. The recent recession pushed unemployment even higher—to 20 percent. Our revival service was jubilant. But before church I talked with two well-dressed middle-aged men who have endured years of unemployment. Both have searched for jobs throughout the region and gone back to the community college to develop new skills, but without success.