'''Hunger''' is applied literally to the need or craving for
food; it can also be applied metaphorically to cravings of other sorts. It is an extreme of a normal
appetite.
The term is commonly used more broadly to refer to cases of widespread malnourishment or deprivation among populations, usually due to
poverty or adverse agricultural conditions; see
famine and
malnutrition for a discussion of this.
Hunger as a condition
The term
hungry is commonly used simply to mean being ready for a
meal. After a long period without food, the mild sensation of hunger associated with being ready for a meal becomes a progressively more severe sensation, until it becomes acutely
painful. Prolonged hunger will drive people to eat substances with no nutritional value, such as grass and soil, simply to fill their stomachs. Eventually, after long enough without food,
death will occur through
starvation.
In contrast,
fasting is the practice of voluntarily not eating for a short period of time.
Lack of particular nutrients leads to particular medical types of malnutrition.
Kwashiorkor and
marasmus are prime examples.
Politics of hunger
Orange ribbon - symbol of hunger awareness
As of 2004, hunger continues to be a worldwide problem. According to the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, "842.5 million people worldwide were undernourished in 1999 to 2001, the most recent years for which figures are available" and the number of hungry people has recently been increasing.
http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2003/issue4/0403p66.asp
There is a wide range of opinions as to why this problem is so persistent. Organizations such as
Food First raise the issue of
food sovereignty and claim that every country on earth (with the possible minor exceptions of some city-states) has sufficient agricultural capacity to feed its own people, but that the "
free trade" economic order associated with such institutions as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank prevent this from happening. At the other end of the spectrum, the World Bank itself claims to be part of the solution to hunger, claiming that the best way for countries to succeed in breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger is to build export-led economies that will give them the financial means to buy foodstuffs on the world market.
Amartya Sen won his 1998
Nobel Prize in part for his work in demonstrating that hunger in modern times was not typically the product of a lack of food; rather, hunger usually arose from problems in food distribution networks or from governmental policies in the developing world.
See also
External links
Category:Humanitarian aid
Category:Food and drink
de:Hunger
es:Hambre
fr:Faim
he:רעב
pl:Głód
pt:Fome
simple:Hunger