What's the estimated number of children who die from starvation worldwide per week?

Factual Questions
1

I have just come across a blurb wherein someone claimed very loudly that 200,000 children in the world starve to death every week.

That did not seem right, and it reminded me of the claim on the cover of “The Population Bomb” (paperback edition, anyway) that four children would starve while “you are reading this [the blurb itself].” A counter-claim that I read later was that the statistic really was about how many people die in third world nations from all causes!

“All causes” would include deaths directly from starvation and from disease linked to malnutrition. But it would also include any war deaths, riots, murders, other homicides, suicides, and a wide variety of accidents. And any diseases not linked to famine or long-term inadequate nutrition. And people just plain too old to go on!

I’ve since been trying a little research on this topic online, and only been partially successful. My main conclusion so far is that the figure “cited” is definitely an inflated one, perhaps early on by someone with an agenda, rather than someone being simply careless. (The oft-quoted factoid that 2/3 of everyone go to bed hungry every night is allegedly only an arithmetic error by a U.N. figure. Adding the wrong columns, or something like that.)

I do also see some early indications that world hunger is simply much less of a monster decade by decade. War-torn countries of course have a much higher per capita of death rate over food issues.

In passing, I also see a trend for high infant mortality rates to be greatly abated as the decades go by. More good news.

(Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not blase about the magnitude that remains.)

But I think the careful use of statistics is important too.

Now, I realize there are some gray areas in definitions, and some difficulties in getting the data right everywhere in the world…

But, can someone provide clear estimates of:

1.) “Children” dying from serious lack of food worldwide…

2.) “Children” dying from serious lack of food in nations included as “Third World”…

per week?

(Raw numbers, then relevant per capita figures, please.)

For the purposes of analyses, I think “children” should mean anyone under 18.

Thank you in advance.

2

The excellent BBC Radio series More or Less just did an analysis of the numbers behind this claim. Check out the 15 June episode.

3

According to a report last year, the number of people who die of starvation has fallen below the number of people who die of obesity.

4

Here’s a site saying that 1.5 million children diefrom hunger per year. That’s roughly 29,000 per week.

The UN world food programmesays 3.1 million. About 60,000 per week.

The 200,000 per week figure looks to be high by between 3 to 7x then.

Here’s a BBC article on the difficulties in estimating these stats.

5

It varies, depending on how many times Bono claps his hands.

6

The figure I’ve heard is 1/8th of people. That is still about 800 million people though who are malnourished.

I don’t have the stats, but the number of people in the developing world who die of diseases of affluence like stroke, heart attack, cancer, dementia, etc is far higher than those who die of diseases of poverty. But ‘developing world’ combines 2nd, 3rd and 4th world countries together. A middle income country like Chile is not Ethiopia. China is not the Ivory coast. etc.

7

Sorry for letting so much time go by, although the day after starting the thread I couldn’t log on.

Wesley Clark, I hadn’t heard of the 1/8 figure but I had heard of 1/6 to 1/4. The former was told to me in a talk rebutting much of what Paul Ehrlich said in Poplulation Bomb. It was by economist Colin Clark and at my Alma Mater-- way back when I was till attending. We’re talking early '70’s, so if the picture is less bleak decade by decade that would fit.

lisiate, I thank you for the sites.

jtur88, I find this interesting, and by coincidence the announcement came over the weekend in that Mexico passed the U.S. up in rate of obesity. Naturally “Wait wait! Don’t tell me!” had a field day with it, and one of the three commentators at the very end made it sound like a temporary sports setback. Another said that we should only take in immigrants that are obese to regain our status. :smiley:

Smeghead, I’ll have to check out the episode when I’m at a PC room with headphones. Thank you.

8

This site (the World Food Programme) says 3,100,000 children die of poor nutrition each year. That works out to about sixty thousand per week.

9

Just a quick reaction: Point #4 seems especially interesting.

Why don’t women farmers have the same access as the men? What can be done about it?

10

We’d really have to know what that quote means. I could easily see that male farmers includes families with both a mother and father but female farmers includes only those families with no adult male. If the lack of resources to such female farmers includes they farm less land because they are busier caring for children, etc., then I’m not sure exactly that could be done just in the context of farming resources.