In 2000, the United Nations established a series of goals to ease global suffering in a variety of forms.  There are eight goals with twenty-one targets that comprise the Millennium Development Goals, including promoting health, education, and gender equality worldwide. 

Goal One: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.  There can be no peace, no justice, and no equality if people do not have the food they need to live and thrive.  Ertharin Cousin, United States Ambassador to the FAO said, “For the first time, instead of setting wishful goals, we acknowledge that there is a goal that exists and affirm a plan to reaching that existing goal.”

Feed The Children is proud to be a part of the solution to ending food insecurity around the world.

The number of children in food insecure households jumped 34% in 2008 to nearly 16.7 million children. The report shows that households with children had nearly twice the rate of food insecurity, 21%, as those without children, 11.3%. Additionally, 12 million adults and 5 million children lived in households with very low food security, meaning that people in the household reduced their food intake or skipped meals because there wasn’t enough money for food. Although adults in the household typically adjust their eating patterns to shield children from hunger, in 2008, 1.1 million children still went without food at some point during the year.

Feed The Children’s Americans Feeding Americans Emergency Caravan™ has provided over 29,000 hurting families across America with nutritious food and personal care items so far. Now more than ever, it’s important to keep our Americans Feeding Americans Emergency Caravan™ on the road.

The economy is prompting a surge in a particular breed of homeless youth: runaways. Many government and advocacy organizations are reporting that as more families contend with poverty, unemployment, and foreclosures, the number of juveniles living on their own is rising, including many children under the age of 13.

The New York Times recently reported that an estimated 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. Runaway youth have a particularly hard time because they are often too young to sign a lease or find legitimate employment. Exposure to violence is often a way of life for many homeless children and youth: by age 12, 83% have been exposed to at least one serious violent event and almost 25% have witnessed acts of violence within their families.

Childhood should be a time of healthy growth, play, and learning, but as Dr. Rank says, “Rather than being a time of security and safety, the childhood years for many American children are a time of economic turmoil, risk, and hardship.”

Poor or inadequate nutrition can cause irreversible damage to a child’s brain and psychosocial development, physical growth, and behavior. Dr. Rank says, “Food stamp use is a clear sign of poverty and food insecurity, two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child’s health.” Thanks to a sputtering economy, the health of our nation’s children is at risk as more children are at risk of hunger.

That’s why Feed The Children exists. We work every day to provide hunger relief to the children in our midst. Our Americans Feeding Americans Emergency Caravan™ continues to roll. We’ve increased the number of food drops with local churches and community organizations to the highest level in Feed The Children’s history. Dr. Rank’s study gives hard evidence to what we’re seeing – more kids and their families needing food assistance than ever before. We will continue this fight against childhood hunger until we no longer have to.

Earlier this year, the United Nations World Food Program revealed that more than 1 billion people in the world are hungry. This recent increase in the number of hungry people worldwide reverses a 30-year downward trend that saw success against hunger here and abroad. Now, every six seconds a child in the developing world dies from hunger. This devastation causes untold suffering and must end. Now is the time for our country to take the lead and make the necessary investments to ensure that no child dies from hunger. Feed The Children strongly supports this initiative and will continue our work to see that these investments are made.

Ed Lazere, Executive Director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute told the New York Times, “It’s been a familiar but depressing story of the only people benefiting in the city’s economy are those with the most education.”

Therefore, one of the keys to ending the cycle of hunger and poverty is education. That’s why Feed The Children is responding by partnering with the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) to provide the District of Columbia Public Schools with needed backpacks, books, and food through our Homeless Education and Literacy Program (HELP). HELP’s goal is to ensure that students have the tools they need to do well in school. Therefore, by sending trucks filled with school supplies to children in DC, we’re feeding not just their minds, but their futures—and contributing to the end of hunger in our nation’s capital.

This year’s distinguished recipient, Dr. Gebisa Ejeta, a professor of agronomy at Purdue University, said that the current food shortage is a “ticking time bomb.” Skyrocketing food and fuel prices in 2008 ultimately resulted in food riots in dozens of countries worldwide. “That was a wake-up call to lots of people and lots of governments,” Dr. Ejeta continued, “not so much because of the hunger concern, I’m afraid to say, but because of fear of political instability.”

World Food Day 2009’s theme, “Achieving food security in times of crisis,” certainly underscores the fact that these are trying times. In fact, they are times like no other in history. More than 1 billion people—a sixth of the world’s population—are hungry. Drought, political strife, and the current economic crisis have further compounded and complicated undernutrition and malnutrition. Thankfully, we can make progress.

In his World Food Day address, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said, “Generally, programs, projects and plans exist and are simply waiting for the political will and resources to become operational.” In other words, the time to act is now.

The National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946, marking the official beginning of the program we know today, but the program has its roots much earlier in history. It was the Great Depression of the 1930s and resulting widespread unemployment and threat of child malnutrition that spurred Congress to make funds available to help children unable to pay for lunches at school. In March of 1937, there were 342,000 children receiving school lunch commodities; today, the National School Lunch Program serves 31 million children.

We know that hungry children can’t learn or grow. Thankfully, the National School Lunch Program is providing wholesome meals to children, ensuring that children across America have the nourishment they need to thrive.

Feed The Children’s disaster services team is hard at work. Through strong partnerships with allied organizations active in disaster relief and the support of generous donors, Feed The Children is able to provide supplies to victims quickly and effectively. Currently, 52 pallets of emergency supplies are in route to California and will be loaded onto container ships on Wednesday for delivery to American Samoa. We are working on securing an air carrier that will ship an initial load of more than 2,300 tents to Indonesia. We have also made available disaster relief supplies to Operation Compassion, who will be transporting 2 containers of tents and sleeping bags to the Philippines and is working on a third to Indonesia.

Newspapers across the country are telling us that more and more people are facing poverty and unemployment–and ultimately seeking assistance from charities or the government to make ends meet. The Financial Times reports that 40 percent of the families now receiving SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) benefits have earned income—an increase of 25 percent from two years ago.

This increase in the number of working poor is largely due to forced reduced work hours: the average work week is currently 33 hours, the lowest on record, and the number of people forced into part-time work because they cannot find full-time work has risen more than 50 percent in the last year.

No matter the reason, an increase in the number of working poor is a sad reminder that even “playing by the rules,” or earning an income, may not be enough to sustain a family.