From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

FROM POVERTY TO POWERHUNGER AND FAMINEHunger exists in a world of plenty.Worldwide, improvements in yieldshave run ahead of population growth, meaning that there is enoughfood to go around. 36 In principle, there is no reason why a single childor adult should go hungry. In fact, the world has a growing number ofobese people, currently standing at 400 million, two-thirds of whomlive in low- or middle-income countries. 37 Levels of obesity in Mexico,Egypt, and South Africa are on a par with those in the USA, bringingwith them soaring rates of diabetes and other ‘diseases of plenty’.Yet one in eight of the world’s people go to bed with empty bellies,perhaps the starkest proof of the deep inequality and injustice thatblights the global economy, both within and between countries. Forthe past 15 years, as the global economy has flourished, the number ofhungry people has been stuck at around 850 million. 38 The globalfigure masks improvements in Asia but rising hunger elsewhere,particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.Famine, where hunger tips over into social breakdown and massstarvation, is less common and less devastating than it once was. Asiaand the Soviet Union were home to the twentieth century’s worstfamines, led by the estimated 30 million people who died in China in1958 and the nine million dead in the Soviet Union in 1921. Bycomparison, the worst famine of recent decades, in Ethiopia in 1984,claimed an estimated one million lives. 39224