Legislative Fact Sheet: Muslims Care: Ending Hunger
Updated February 2008

The Issue

• Hunger has grown in the United States while aid remains stagnant.
• Global hunger persists and its effects are widespread and dramatic.
• Voters are increasingly concerned. They are more willing to spend money on addressing hunger in the United States and worldwide.

Reasons to Enhance Support for Anti-Hunger Measures

Despite progress made in reducing hunger worldwide, close to a billion are still suffering.¹

• 854 million people in the world go hungry.²
  • China - 114 million
  • India - 221 million
  • Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where hunger is increasing, with 204 million hungry.
  • 799 million of these people live in the developing world.
• Over the past twenty years, the number of the world's hungry has only decreased from 1/5th to 1/6th of the global population.¹
• In developing countries nearly11 million children die every year from preventable and treatable causes. Sixty percent of these deaths are from hunger and malnutrition.²
• Forty-seven percent (47%) of South Asian pre-school children and thirty-one percent (31%) ofsub-Saharan Africa pre-school children are underweight.¹

The effects of hunger are widespread and dramatic.

• Hunger results in higher rates of disease and mortality, limited neurological development, and low productivity.¹
• Hunger limits a country's ability to develop economically, socially and politically.
  • Poor and hungry societies are more easily fall into conflict over scarce vital resources, such as watering holes and arable land-and over scarce natural resources, such as oil, diamonds, and timber.¹

Hunger has grown in the United States while aid has remained stagnant.

• Food insecurity refers to situations in which access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources. In 2006, 35.5 million people-including 12.6 million children-lived in food insecure households.²
  • 1.1 million live in households that experience hunger. Some frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day.
  • 24.4 million live in households that are at risk of hunger. They experience lower quality diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need.

• Very low food insecurity has grown steadily since 1999.³

• The asset limit in the Food Stamp Program - the amount of money a person can have in a savings account, pension plan, etc. - and still be eligible to receive food stamps, has been essentially frozen at $2000 since 1977.⁴
• Surplus food donations, or bonus commodities, from USDA to food banks have declined more than 70 percent in the last three years due to a strong agriculture economy. In 2006, the value of this food support to food banks was down $175 million from 2003.⁴

Religious institutions and charities are straining to serve rising requests for food from their pantries and soup kitchens, especially from working people. ⁶

• America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest network of food banks, reports an estimated 24 to 27 million people turned to the agencies they serve.
• The U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that in 2006 requests for emergency food assistance increased an average of7%.⁵
• Almosthalf the cities surveyed were not able to provide an adequate quantity of food to those in need. And63% reported they had to decrease the quantity of food provided and/or the number of times people can come to get food assistance.⁶
• An average of23 percent of the demand for emergency food assistance is estimated to have gone unmet in the survey cities,up from18 percent last year.⁶
• 37 percent of adults requesting emergency food assistance were employed.⁶
  • Unemployment, high housing costs, poverty or lack of income, andhigh medical costsled the list of reasons contributing to the rise.

Voters are growing increasingly concerned about hunger in the United States and abroad. They are willing to spend more to solve the problem.

• Between May 2003 and June 2007, the percentage of likely voters who said that "a candidate's position on reducing the hunger problem" was important when deciding their vote for Congress increased from 74% to 88%, and the percentage saying it was "very important" nearly doubled from 23% to 44%. A majority of Americans (54%) do not believe that "political candidates have spent an adequate amount of time discussing hunger and poverty issues."⁶
• Seventy-one percent of voters say they would support the United States spending an additional 1% of the federal budget on international aid programs.⁷

Would you support or oppose the United States dedicating an additional 1% of the federal budget to the needs of the world's poorest people, including aid for education, hunger, poverty, clean water, children's health and AIDS treatment?

• In national polls, reducing hunger and poverty has been described as one of the most important issues by many voters, easily outdistancing other concerns such as the environment, crime and moral values.⁷

Additional Details

• Even relatively "mild" undernutrition-the kind of hunger we have in the United States-produces cognitive impairments in children which can last a lifetime, according to Dr. J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University.⁷
  • "By taking youngsters and subjecting them to hunger, we rob them of their God-given potential. We then deliver them to the schoolhouse door with one arm tied behind their backs and expect teachers to perform an often-impossible task. This, in turn, results in the waste of billions of dollars we invest in the education of our children because hunger prevents so many of them from getting the full value of their educational experience."
• In May, U.S. Reps. James McGovern (D-MA) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) invited their colleagues, in the House of Representatives to join them in living on a food stamp budget for seven days. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) agreed to participate. While shopping at Safeway, Ryan quickly saw the limits of his budget. "It's unbelievable," he said as he selected peanut butter, jelly, bread, and a big bag of cornmeal. He also got canned tomato sauce and pasta on sale. There was no money for meat, milk, juice, fresh fruit or vegetables, except 32 cents' worth of garlic to flavor the tomato sauce. "By the end of the week, I'm going to be eating cornmeal and strawberry preserves."¹⁰
• Child poverty is more widespread in the United States than in any other industrialized country; at the same time, the U.S. government spends less than any industrialized country to pull its children out of poverty.⁹
• Hunger causes losses of at least 6 to 10% in forgone GDP due to losses in labor productivity.
• Researcher John Cook of the Boston University School of Medicine found that it would cost 30 percent more than the typical benefit to purchase a diet that meets the American Heart Association's recommendations.¹⁰
• The U.S. budget devotes only one-half of 1 percent to poverty-focused development assistance.¹¹