About one in nine people on earth, more than the population of the United States and the European Union combined, doesn't have enough to eat.

One out of six children in developing countries which are about roughly 100 million individuals is underweight.

Each year, 22 million children are born underweight because their mothers are malnourished.

At this moment, about 800 million people are suffering from chronic hunger.

Physical Effects

Malnutrition magnifies the effect of every disease.
An estimated 161 million children under the age of five, in the developing world are stunted due to malnutrition. It also results in poor physical and cognitive development as well as lower resistance to illness.

Globally, children who are poorly nourished suffer up to 160 days of illness each year. They are sick for almost half of their lives.

Vitamin A, IDD and Anemia

One out of three people in developing countries are affected by vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The three most important micronutrients in terms of health consequences for poor people in developing countries are Iodine, iron and Vitamin A.

Iodine deficiency disorder (IDD) jeopardizes children’s mental health and often their life. Serious iodine deficiency during pregnancy may result in stillbirths, abortions, and congenital abnormalities such as cretinism - a grave, irreversible form of mental retardation that affects people living in iodine-deficient areas of Africa and Asia.
IDD also causes mental impairment that lowers intellectual ability.
IDD affects more than 740 million people, 13% of the world’s population. 50 million people have some degree of mental impairment caused by IDD.

1.62 billion people - 25% of the world’s population—are anemic, mainly due to iron deficiency, and, in developing countries, it is frequently exacerbated by malaria and worm infections. As a result of anemia - premature birth, low birth weight, infections, impaired physical and cognitive developments and elevated risk of death are very common among children.

Over 250 million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin A deficiency. In developing countries, vitamin A deficiency permanently blinds between 250,000 and 500,000 children a year. It is the leading cause of childhood blindness. It also increases the severity of childhood illnesses.

Psychological Effects

Hunger, and insecurity about whether a family will be able to obtain enough food to avoid hunger, also has an emotional impact on children and their parents.
Anxiety, negative feelings about self-worth and hostility towards the outside world can result from chronic hunger and food insecurity.
Children suffer from the thought that they won’t have anything to eat after 15 hours of hard work.

Hunger and Poverty

Hunger is an effect of poverty and poverty is a political issue.
While manifesting itself as an economic issue, conditions causing poverty are political. To put it bluntly, those with most of the money control most of the resources, whilst those with little or no money go hungry.

In most countries with widespread hunger, a few large landowners control nearly all agricultural production with horrible results.
Land is used for "cash crops" such as cotton, cocoa and coffee instead of food.
To the owners, land becomes an "investment" not a source of food for the people who live on it. Humans starve each other to death for money.

World hunger exists because:
(1) Colonialism, and later "subtle" monopoly capitalism, dispossess hundreds of millions of people from the land
(2) The poorer countries sell produce to the richer countries because there is no local market (because the extremely poor people do not have enough to pay)
(3) Poor people from poor countries are producing food for much richer people in much richer countries, and while stripping all natural wealth from the land

To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for their family to eat, and start thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy. Food is a commodity.
Many of the world’s lands suitable for agriculture are used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane and cocoa, which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a big market.
The problem, of course, is that people who don't have enough money to buy food simply ‘don't count’ in the food equation.

What this means is that ending hunger requires ending poverty, or at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, and hence create a market demand for food.

Obesity

Some relate hunger in the developing world to obesity in the developed world, however one is not at all the cause of the other.
In fact obese people are victims too. Of course it is a whole different level of poverty but it is no coincidence that most of the obese people are poor, as the cheapest food items are also the least healthy and the most fattening ones. Humans are constantly manipulated to consume food against their long term interests. Food Companies produce attractive products in attractive packages with an attractive smell which in the best case, have no nutritional contribution to the consumers, and most probably will hurt them in the long run.

Fast food chains spend more than 3 billion dollars a year on advertising, mostly aimed at children. Since the 1960s, when children were singled out as a lucrative market, an advertising goal has been to reach children as early as possible, to create life-long consumers.
Restaurants offer incentives such as playgrounds, contests, clubs, games, free toys and other merchandise related to movies, TV shows and even sports leagues. Most food advertising on children's TV shows is for fast foods, soft drinks, candy and pre-sweetened cereals, while commercials for healthy food make up only 5% of those shown.
The overall message from this advertising is clear – eat a lot of food, snack between meals, lobby parents to buy certain products (what the industry calls "pester power").

The irony of the present system is that millions of people in the developed world countries are dying from diseases of affluence like heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and cancer, while the poor in the third world are dying from diseases of poverty, like hunger, as a result of the denial of access to land to grow food for their families, the same land that is used to grow products for people in the developed world.

Famine

Famine is a state of acute hunger, with a total lack of food supplies for entire populations. Famine affects people who find themselves where natural disasters occurred or if they are involved in conflicts where hunger is increasingly being used as a political weapon.

Disasters can have severe economic impacts which are difficult to calculate. The Western Indian Ocean islands typically experience ten cyclones a year, between November and May, which bring strong winds and heavy rainfall. This causes destruction of infrastructure, particularly in low-lying areas and where settlements have encroached into flood-prone areas. Huge costs are generated due to the destruction of income-years of activities, including tourism revenues, and rehabilitation and replacement of damaged infrastructure and crops.

Africa’s people and economies are heavily dependent on rain fed agriculture, and are therefore vulnerable to rainfall fluctuations. It is usually the poor who suffer most from floods or droughts. That is because the poor often cultivate in areas that are climatically marginal for crop production, and therefore cannot accumulate reserves for times of hardship so droughts and floods can result in malnutrition and famine.

Deliberate Famine

Worldwide, there are more than 65 million refugees and displaced people – largely as a result of wars, political turbulence, civil conflict and social unrest. In such emergencies, malnutrition runs rampant, dramatically increasing the risk of disease and death.

Civil strife and instability at regional and local levels will further restrict the poor’s access to food. In areas of conflict, rural populations are frequently forced to flee for their safety, leaving crops untended, which are in many cases burned and other productive assets are stolen.
Conflicts disrupt traditional agricultural practices, and exacerbate the effects of climatic fluctuations.

The impossibility of delivering aid to victims, because the roads are blocked by people exploiting famine situations for all kind of gains, or because climatic disasters block the routes to their homes, is a significant cause of famine.

As opposed to the rather popular claim that veganism can solve world hunger, reality is much more complex. Surely much more food can be produced if it’s vegan however, world hunger is not a consequence of lack of food but mainly a consequence of poverty, of political conflicts, economic pressure of western corporations and governments put on poorer economies to raise cash-crops instead of food, as well as of climate change and natural disasters.

But our point here is not to refute activists’ argument that veganism would solve world hunger, our point is to refute activists’ argument that they must try to appeal to humans’ morality.

Despite that activists are confronting humans with their alleged responsibility to world hunger they are not cooperating.

Even when humans are told they can help solve world hunger if they adopt veganism they still choose not to.

It is almost redundant to say that humans’ suffering is not more important than animals’ suffering, but human suffering is more important to most humans, only much less than to keep eating what they enjoy so much.

This is the human race.
Activists shouldn’t look for more ways to reach humans, but to focus on the only one who can really reach the end of nonhumans suffering.