About the Report
Every year, the Bread for the World Institute publishes an annual report on the state of world hunger, the hunger report. As part of the Institute's commitment to anti-hunger education, the report strengthens the anti-hunger movement by analyzing the causes of and solutions to hunger.
Executive summaries of the following reports are available online, or order the entire report on our publications page.
NEW: Hunger 2009 Interactive Edition. Our new initiative offers complete access to the 2009 report, including interactive maps and charts, videos and more.
Hunger 2009
Global Development: Charting a New Course
As the first decade of the 21st century winds down, the world is facing a hunger challenge unlike anything it has seen in the past 50 years. A steep rise in food and fuel prices has already undone some of the progress achieved in recent decades, and now a global financial crisis threatens to do worse damage still. It has been more than a decade since prices were increasing as quickly as they are now. Unlike earlier spikes in global food prices, today’s higher prices are expected to remain for up to a decade, perhaps longer.
The challenges to development are real, but they are not insurmountable. Ample proof exists that large gains have and can be made. Triumph depends on the commitment of developing countries, a commitment that must include promoting good governance and building strong institutions, establishing peace and stability, and preserving and respecting environmental resources. To make development work on a grand scale, the kind of scale envisioned in the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, developed countries also have to do their part, providing much-needed assistance and ensuring that other policies they put in place do not harm development. This partnership between the developed and developing worlds is the key to achieving the MDGs. It will take a stepped-up effort on the part of everyone. Continuing with “business as usual” will mean that hope of achieving the MDGs will fade out of sight.
Taken together, the MDGs represent a comprehensive vision of human development—one marked by dignity, equality, and opportunity for all. The MDGs include reducing poverty and hunger, increasing school enrollment, empowering women and girls, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, halting and then reversing the spread of deadly diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability.
Global Development: Charting a New Course analyzes the inefficiencies in the current structure of U.S. foreign assistance and maps out a series of reforms to elevate development as a foreign policy priority.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Global Development: Charting a New Course will be available online Thanksgiving 2008. The print edition will be available January 2009.
Hunger 2008:
Working Harder for Working Families
A scarcity of food is rarely the cause of hunger. There is more than enough food to feed everyone in the United States. The supermarket store shelves are stocked to the ceiling. But none of this matters if families have no money in their pockets. Poverty spoils every meal.
The lone homeless person may be the most conspicuous image of poverty in the national media. Less conspicuous, but a much larger group, are the families who cycle in and out of poverty. Families most at risk are those that are just a little better off than poor, surviving on low-wage jobs until suddenly they lose their financial footing because the main wage earner's job has been eliminated or one of the family members has a medical emergency.
Liberals and conservatives agree, no hard working family should have to raise their children in poverty—and yet the sad truth is that many are. Two-thirds of all children growing up in poverty in the United States have one or more working parents, and one-third have a parent working full-time, year round.
Three decades ago, a low-wage job was enough to lift a family of three out of poverty; today, it scarcely comes close to getting them to the poverty line, and without food assistance and other government support a family struggling to get by in the low-wage economy would be on the absolute edge of desperation. Working Harder for Working Families focuses on families struggling to get by on these kinds of jobs, living in or on the edge of poverty. It recommends policies to support low-wage workers and help them and their families build assets.
No reuse of Hunger Report material is allowed without express consent of BFW
