Chapter 3: Gender
Empower Women and Girls

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Leave No Woman Behind

Continued discrimination against women and girls would make it impossible to end hunger and poverty. Women farmers produce much of the food consumed in low-income countries, but gender discrimination lowers their productivity. Women are expected to complete most household chores, which are not only unpaid, but more difficult and time-consuming in low-income households without amenities such as running water and electricity. Increased investments in education would make it possible for more girls to realize their full potential and end cycles of intergenerational poverty.

A key factor in ending hunger is ending pervasive gender inequities. In 2013, Bread for the World Institute’s 2013 Hunger Report, Within Reach, featured Gilma, a 5-year-old girl living in the Dry Corridor region of Guatemala—an area that suffers frequent droughts due to climate change. During a severe drought in 2012, U.S. food aid provided a buffer between families and hunger, but the aid delivered to Gilma’s family was not enough for them all.

In many societies, women and girls are expected to eat last, eat less, and in times of scarcity not eat at all. Gilma is the only girl among the five children in her family. To put it bluntly, the boys got to eat while she starved. By the time aid workers with Save the Children—the organization distributing the food aid—learned of her situation, Gilma had already reached a deadly stage of hunger: severe acute malnutrition. Gilma nearly died. Not because she is a poor child in a region where food is often scarce, but because she is a girl.

In more than half the countries in the world, women do not have land ownership rights equal to those of men. In these countries, a widow or daughter usually cannot inherit land upon the death of her husband or father. Countries that have reformed their laws to grant land-tenure rights to women have found that significant improvements in health, nutrition, and education follow for both women and their children. In Nepal, children are 33 percent less likely to be severely underweight in households where women own land.

Inequities based on gender also include less access to other resources such as seeds, fertilizer, and credit. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that if all women smallholder farmers had equal access to productive resources, they could produce 20 to 30 percent more food, and between 100 million and 150 million fewer people would be hungry.

Education is one of the most powerful drivers of progress against hunger, and the education of girls has paid off in all regions of the world. Improvements in education reduce child hunger. In an analysis of 63 developing countries, improvements in women’s education was credited for 44 percent of the reduction in child hunger over 25 years—more than the 26 percent decrease due to increases in food availability. Each additional year of primary school boosts women’s wages in adulthood by 10 to 20 percent, and each additional year of secondary school by 15 to 25 percent.

Men also increase their earning potential with more education. But in the effort to improve the health and standard of living of children and families, women’s education is more important. Research from all parts of the world shows that women are more likely to spend their earnings on their children’s education, health care, and nutrition. Their priorities are different from men’s, which is one reason development programs that include cash assistance generally distribute money directly to mothers.

In low-income countries, despite progress, girls are still less likely to be in school than boys. This is particularly true of secondary school. In some situations, girls risk their lives to get an education. In October 2012, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, now a world-renowned advocate for girls’ education usually known as simply “Malala,” was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman. Yousafzai’s family is from Pakistan’s SWAT Valley, a conflict-affected region that is a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban. The Taliban are extremists who oppose women’s education. The gunman stormed the school bus Malala Yousafzai was on and threatened to kill every girl on board if no one would identify the one who was “making trouble.”

Malala recovered from the shooting. In 2014, when she was 17, she became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate for courageously standing up to extremists and championing the rights of girls. The same year, 276 school girls in northern Nigeria were abducted by members of the terror group Boko Haram, who also oppose educating girls in the belief that women should not think independently. These incidents occurred in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, respectively, which have the largest gender gaps in education and, not coincidentally, the highest hunger rates.

Gender inequities hurt everyone—men, women, and children. A 2015 report by the McKinsey Global Institute concluded that gender inequality costs as much as $28 trillion annually in lost global GDP. That amount is the size of the economies of the United States and China combined. A world where so many people are hungry and poor clearly cannot afford gender discrimination. Read more from Chapter 3: Gender.

In the United States, Gender Equity Requires More Political Power

Some of the most glaring instances of gender discrimination in the United States occur in the workplace. U.S. policymakers have been slow to respond, and when they do, their actions have generally fallen short of what is actually needed. Because women are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in most households, pay discrimination and other workplace biases threaten the food security of many families. Improving our economic system so that it works for everyone calls for a more equitable distribution of political power between men and women.

Women earn less than men for doing the same work. This is true in all 20 of the most common occupations for women.²⁷ In female-dominated fields, such as nursing assistants and preschool and kindergarten teachers, men on average are paid a higher wage. Women make up approximately 90 percent of the U.S. home healthcare workforce, but men doing the same work doing the same work are paid more. Nationwide, counting workers in all occupations, women are paid 22 percent less than male peers. The gender wage gap is even larger for women of color.

The gender wage gap is not due to outside factors such as having less education or living in areas with a lower cost of living—the 22 percent is after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, and location.²⁸ This means that women must work the equivalent of an additional 13 weeks each year to have the same income as a male counterpart.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was supposed to require equal pay for equal work, but loopholes in the law make it easy to avoid compliance. In 1963, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women were paid 59 cents for every dollar that men were paid.²⁹ There has been some progress, but if progress continues at its average rate from 1963 until today, the gender pay gap will close in 2059. Progress has been slower since 2000 than between 1963 and 1999, and if we use this more recent rate of progress to see when gender pay equity will arrive, we get … 2119.³⁰ You read that right: at the present rate of progress, it will take a century to close the pay gap.

The Paycheck Fairness Act is a legislative proposal that would update the Equal Pay Act, closing the loopholes that permit employers to pay different wages to men and women who do the same job and have the same level of experience. This bill was first introduced in 1997. It has been reintroduced several times in the years since, but it has never cleared both houses of Congress.

Equal pay for women would have a profound impact on poverty in our country. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported in 2017 that equal pay would reduce the poverty rate by more than half, from from 8 to 4 percent.³¹ Women of color would benefit, especially, because the gender wage gap is substantially higher for communities of color. White women who work full-time, year-round have an earnings ratio with their white male counterparts of 77 percent. Black women who work full-time, year-round are paid 61 percent of what white men are paid, indigenous women 58 percent, and Latinas 53 percent.³²

Education should be an equalizer of wage gaps. But obtaining more education will not close the gender wage gap. Women already earn high school diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees at higher rates than men, and this has been true for some time now. In fact, girls are more likely to graduate from high school than boys in every state.³³

Becoming a mother worsens the gender wage gap. Becoming a father, on the other hand, increases a man’s earning power. Mothers with full-time, year-round jobs are paid 71 cents for every dollar that fathers are paid.34 Mothers are the sole or primary breadwinner in more than 40 percent of all families, and a co-breadwinner in another 20 percent.³⁵ All children who rely on their mother’s income to pay the bills are at greater risk of food insecurity. In 2017, 5.6 million children with working mothers lived below the poverty line. If the mothers had had equal pay, there would have been 3.1 million such children—not a small number, but a lot less than 5.6 million. Nearly 26 million children, in poor, near-poor, and higher-income families combined, would have benefited from equal pay.³⁶

Single-parent households led by women have one of the highest poverty rates of all groups:

34 percent in 2017, compared to 16 percent for families headed by a single father.37 The poverty rate for single-parent families headed by African American women, Latinas, and Indigenous women (37 percent, 41 percent, and 42 percent, respectively) are higher than for white women (29 percent).38 Equal pay would cut the poverty rate for single mothers in half, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.³⁹

Women are more likely to hold low-paying jobs than men, which exacerbates the wage inequity between women and men. There has been little progress on reducing the U.S. economy’s high levels of job segregation by gender and race. This is especially true for women of color, who are overrepresented in nearly all lower-paying jobs.

Nearly half of all home care workers are women of color. Home care workers, who provide health care and personal assistance for seniors and people with disabilities, are one of the fastest-growing U.S. occupations. These workers have always been disproportionately women of color. The median pay of home care workers is slightly more than $23,000 a year. That is not enough to move a family of four over the poverty line. More than half of all home care workers receive some type of federal benefit, and nearly one-third receive nutrition assistance.⁴⁰

Seventy percent of restaurant servers are women. Servers are paid what’s known as a “tipped wage,” a federally established floor that has been set at $2.13 an hour since 1991. Servers are three times as likely to be living in poverty as the rest of the U.S. workforce.⁴¹ Read more from Chapter 3: Gender.

Endnotes for Chapter 3: Gender

1. 1. Malala Yousafzai (July 12, 2013), address to United Nations Youth Assembly.

1. 1. Grow Africa (2016), Smallholder Working Group Briefing Paper—Women Smallholders.

1. 1. Landesa (February 22, 2016), “The Law of the Land: Women’s Rights to Land.”

1. United States Agency for International Development: Land Links (December 1, 2016), Fact Sheet: Land Tenure and Women’s Empowerment.
2. ( … )
3. View all report endnotes  

Chapter 4: Climate Change
Resilience for an Unpredictable Future

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Climate Change Threatens the Goal of
Ending Global Hunger

Building resilience is paramount as the effects of climate change become more severe and affect more people. World hunger has been gradually declining over the past several decades, but increased over the last several years. Climate change was a prominent cause of this reversal. The world cannot end hunger without slowing climate change and identifying affordable strategies to respond to its impacts.

Low-income countries suffered from climate change before others, have the fewest resources to invest in protecting their people and economies, and did least to cause the problem. Climate change is a leading cause of the rise in global hunger seen in the past three years—countries cannot afford to identify and implement solutions to this wide-scale and unprecedented threat to agriculture and health.

Climate change may prove to be the most enduring of all challenges to ending hunger. Some of the hungriest areas of the world are the most exposed. Droughts and storms of historic intensity have become the norm. In 2017, extreme climate events—mainly drought—triggered major hunger crises in 23 countries. Tens of millions of people required urgent food assistance, two-thirds of them in Africa.

The world is running out of time to avert catastrophic impacts, according to a 2018 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced substantially by 2030, people will be displaced at rapidly accelerating rates—essentially creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

In both tropical and temperate regions, crop yields are on the decline,  whether countries are affected by conflict or not. Evidence shows that rising levels of carbon dioxide reduce the nutritional content of staple grains, such as rice, wheat, and maize—the cornerstones of diets around the world.  A team of public health researchers estimates that climate change could increase child stunting rates by 30 to 50 percent by 2050. This is primarily because people in areas affected by climate change produce less and less food as conditions deteriorate.

Unless the world takes effective action in time, the increasing frequency and severity of climate-related disasters will destroy more and more crops and livestock herds. Waves of rural people will be forced to flee to crowded cities or other countries.

Climate change is a significant but underappreciated reason people seek to cross the U.S. southern border from Mexico.  Droughts in the Dry Corridor region of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have gotten longer and more intense. In 2015-2016, for example, 3.6 million people received humanitarian assistance during a severe and prolonged drought.

Researchers reported in 2018 that there are now twice as many climate-related disasters each year as there were in the early 1990s.  People who experience hunger the most tend to live in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries where they must rely on their own crop production to feed their families. Extreme conditions associated with climate change, such as floods, drought, and crop damaging temperatures, harm people not only by reducing the amount of food they are able to harvest and eat, but also by reducing their incomes and driving up food prices. In 2017, drought in Ethiopia caused the price of maize to suddenly increase by 30 percent,  while Pakistan’s unprecedented flooding in 2010 devastated the national wheat crop and drove prices up by 50 percent.

Smallholder farmers are affected greatly by climate change. They are vulnerable when natural disasters strike, such as floods, and life-sustaining harvests fail. They have little to no savings that could serve as a buffer. Nearly all of their cash income is spent on food. If they own anything, it is often livestock, which are very vulnerable in conditions where even plants cannot thrive.

The burden of climate change falls especially hard on women and girls—the chief suppliers of water for their families. Women in Africa and Asia walk an average of 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) daily to collect it.  Climate change exacerbates water shortages—and already, according to the World Bank, 1.6 billion people live in countries with water scarcity. Climate change could cause this number to double in the next couple of decades.

As a result of the water scarcity, women are forced to walk farther to collect it for cooking and other chores. Water is a necessity, and the task requires the help of everyone. This may include young girls and elderly women alike. Pregnant women and even women recovering from illness may be called upon to help. This unpaid labor leaves women with less time to earn money, care for children, study, or rest.

The effects of climate change can occur so gradually that people may not realize what has happened until several years later. Slow-motion change is as catastrophic as natural disasters for people who depend on their own food production to meet most or all of their needs. Rising sea levels in Bangladesh have destroyed coastal rice growing areas because the increased concentration of salt poisons the soil.  In the Sahel region of Africa, desertification has forced pastoralists to abandon their usual grazing routes. The shortage of resources caused by climate change sometimes leads to conflict, and in the Sahel, pastoralist groups arriving in areas where farmers have already settled has meant violent clashes over the depleted resources.

When governments either cannot or will not respond effectively to problems caused by climate change, all too often the result is conflict, hunger crises, or both. Syria’s disastrous civil war has more to do with climate change than people might expect. The conflict broke out against the backdrop of a devastating drought that lasted from 2006 until 2010. The drought destroyed the livelihoods of more than half of the country’s farmers and herders—and by 2009, 80 percent of all the cattle in the entire country had died. Waves of people fled Syria’s rural areas to try to earn income in urban centers. The Syrian government’s ineffectual response to the food security crisis caused by the drought  fueled longstanding political grievances, as did overcrowding in the cities. The government of Syria did not respond to the suffering caused by the intersection of climate change and hunger—setting in motion one of the worst humanitarian disasters since World War II.
Read more from Chapter 4: Climate Change.

U.S. Jobs to Fight Climate Change and Hunger

Low-income communities are the most vulnerable to climate change, especially communities of color. To minimize the effects of climate change, the United States needs to invest in improving the national infrastructure and in decarbonizing our energy supply by replacing fossil fuels with clean-energy alternatives. The good news is that it is possible to accomplish both these tasks while simultaneously strengthening the economy by creating millions of new, fairly paid jobs.

In the decade leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the number of major weather-related disasters in the United States increased by twothirds.²⁴ The devastating impacts of Katrina should have changed the conversation about climate change and how to respond to it. It may have done so for some U.S. officials and residents, but any sense of urgency turned out to be fragmented and short-lived.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into states along the Northeast Coast, leaving 7.5 million households and businesses in the region without power.²⁵ New York City had a record storm surge of 13 feet that flooded the subway system in lower Manhattan. The Metropolitan Transit Authority estimated that the storm caused nearly $5 billion in infrastructure damage.²⁶

2017 was the country’s worst hurricane season yet—in terms of money, but also in loss of life and the number of people who were displaced. Hurricanes Irma and Maria were Category 5, the most powerful, and Hurricane Harvey was Category 4. It was the first time on record that three or more Category 4 storms occurred in a single year, but the increasing frequency of such ferocious storms is leading climate scientists to describe this as the new normal.²⁷

In 2018, Hurricanes Florence and Michael caused historic levels of destruction in the Carolinas and the Florida Panhandle.

According to climate scientists, climate change meant that Hurricane Florence brought 50 percent more rain than it otherwise would have.²⁸ The evidence continues to mount, and it is difficult at this point for anyone to make a logical argument that climate change is not real.

People of lower economic means suffer the most when major natural disasters hit. They tend to live in neighborhoods with a high concentration of poverty. The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, the city’s poorest neighborhood, sustained the most severe damage from Hurricane Katrina. Nearly everyone who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward was African American,²⁹ and racial discrimination was a primary reason for the neglect of their community, including its infrastructure and construction. In Houston, low-income African American communities also lost far more than upper-income white neighborhoods. The reason is clear: Houston is one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation, and African American communities are concentrated in the most flood-prone areas of the city.³⁰

Hurricanes are an example of climate change’s sudden events. Sea-level rise, on the other hand, is a slow-onset impact. Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in densely populated coastal areas.31 Poverty is again a reliable predictor of how vulnerable individuals and communities are. Some indigenous communities in Florida, Louisiana, and the Pacific face complete destruction from rising sea levels. Since 1955, Isle de Jean Charles in southeastern Louisiana, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw indigenous communities, has lost 98 percent of its land to sea-level rise.³²

Another way to see how people of different socioeconomic classes respond to natural disaster—or the risk of natural disaster—is to study migration patterns. A study that looked at 80 years of data, from 1930 through 2010, found that affluent people are more likely to move away from areas prone to natural disaster, while people with few resources are often stuck living in these places.³³ In Puerto Rico, people with more money led the exodus from the island following the devastation of Hurricane Maria.

According to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, the population in Puerto Rico may
eventually be 14 percent lower than it was before the hurricane.³⁴

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and have a legal right to relocate to the U.S. mainland. But this is not a genuine option for people who don’t have the resources needed to leave and resettle. Even before Hurricane
Maria, nearly half of Puerto Rico’s residents lived below the poverty line.³⁵ This rate is now higher because so many people who had enough resources to leave have done so.

Just as in low-income countries, hunger is a concern after natural disaster. Climate change will be a continual challenge to the infrastructure and the budgets of federal nutrition programs. Disaster SNAP (D-SNAP) enables families who would not normally be eligible for SNAP benefits to qualify by deducting from their incomes expenses related to evacuation, injury or death, clean-up, or repair, as well as income lost because of the disaster.³⁶ In the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued temporary SNAP benefits to 2.1 million and 2.5 million people, respectively.³⁷ D-SNAP is typically one of the fastest ways that help gets to disaster victims.
Read more from Chapter 4: Climate Change.

Endnotes for Chapter 4: Climate

1. 1. USAID (2012), Building Resilience to Recurrent Crises.

1. 1. Food Security Information Network (2018), Global Report on Food Crises 2018

1. 1. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WHO, and WFP (2018), The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018: Building Climate Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition.

1. 1. Matthew R. Smith and Samuel S. Myers (September 2018), “Impact of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on global human nutrition,” Nature Climate Change, Vol. 8, 834-839.

1. Simon J. Lloyd, R. Sari Kovats, and Zaid Chalabi (2011), “Climate, Crop Yields, and Undernutrition: Development of a Model to Quantify the Impact of Climate Scenarios on Child Undernutrition,” Environmental Health Perspectives 119(12).
2. ( … )
3. View all report endnotes  

Chapter 5: Fragility
Cultivate Peace and Justice

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Wars Create Hunger, and Hunger Creates Wars

Countries at peace are making steady progress against hunger while most of those that lag furthest behind are conflict-affected. Conflict is the main cause of the past two years’ largest global refugee crisis since World War II. The global community and national governments around the world must assist noncombatants whose lives are turned upside down, their health and safety put at grave risk. With humanitarian and development assistance working in concert, it is possible for countries to make rapid progress once peace is secured.

Peace and stability are the two most valuable assets we have to end global hunger. Armed conflict is the exact opposite—it rapidly reverses any progress a nation or community may have made. Today, most people who are hungry live in conflict-affected countries,  and people living in conflict-affected countries are three times as likely to be at risk of hunger.

In turn, hunger can easily lead to conflict. For example, armed factions such as the terror group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, do not necessarily need a compelling ideology to replenish their ranks because joining the group is one of the few ways to earn income. Young men desperate to escape hunger and deep poverty “volunteer” to fight.

Over the last decade, the number of armed conflicts has increased. Most are civil wars within a country’s borders that pit government forces against one or more rebel groups. In the last few years, the increase in the number of people needing urgent food assistance is a result of intensified conflict in a handful of countries: Myanmar, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South Sudan, and Yemen.

By the end of 2017, the number of forcibly displaced people had reached 68.5 million. This is the highest number recorded since the end of World War II.  The United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which provides food relief during humanitarian emergencies, reported that armed conflict is responsible for 80 percent of the world’s humanitarian needs.  In 2018, WFP reported that 10 of the 13 largest hunger crises it worked on were in conflict-affected nations.

Armed fighters, pitched battles, and other signs of conflict are hallmarks of fragile states. Another characteristic is poor or weak governance. When a national government is unable or unwilling to provide services and protection to large swaths of its people, those citizens are unlikely to believe in its legitimacy. As a result, citizens are far more likely to take up arms with the goals of securing their basic needs and establishing a government that they consider legitimate and capable of protecting them. The potential for violent crime is another consequence of weak governance—whether organized by criminal enterprises or seemingly random.

Violent crime is a major reason that increasing numbers of Central American refugees are trycing to cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum in the United States. During the past couple of years, an increasing share of migrants is either children arriving without adults or family groups. The majority of migrants seeking refuge in the United States come from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In 2015 when women arriving from the Northern Triangle and Mexico were screened, 82 percent were found to qualify for entry to the United States as refugees based on the legal standard of a “credible fear of persecution or torture” if forced to return to their countries.

Hunger is another reason for migration. All three countries have very high levels of hunger and malnutrition. More than half of Northern Triangle residents live below their own national poverty lines. In Honduras, nearly two-thirds of the population lives in poverty,  and nearly half of Guatemala’s children are chronically malnourished.  Malnutrition kills many young children and causes irreversible damage to many who survive.

Climate change is another driver of fragility. Central America’s geography makes it extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change: it is in the path of tropical storms from both the east and west. Extreme weather events such as droughts, extreme heat, and flooding have become increasingly frequent. Between 1994 and 2013, Honduras was number one in the world among countries affected by extreme weather events, with Nicaragua fourth, Guatemala ninth, and El Salvador twelfth.  In 2011, flooding in El Salvador destroyed an estimated 60 percent of the entire national corn and bean crops.

During armed conflict, noncombatants forced to flee their homes to survive are at tremendous risk of hunger and malnutrition. Many more people die from hunger and disease during and after wars than die from bombs, bullets, or other direct violence.  In interviews with aid workers, South Sudanese refugees who found protection at a U.N. camp described the ordeal of enduring days of hunger and thirst. As one aid agency reported, “The only water they could get was from swamps, and they neither boiled nor filtered it…They described eating the ‘gum,’ the part of the tree exposed when one cuts a branch.”

Perhaps nothing speaks more to the moral indecency of hunger than images of children suffering from wasting, a severe form of malnutrition that leads to death if not treated in time. In the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, currently the world’s largest refugee camp with almost a million people, the World Food Program reports that 21 percent of all children younger than 5 are acutely malnourished, and 7.5 percent are severely malnourished.  The refugees are from the Rohingya ethnic and religious minority community in Myanmar (formerly Burma). They fled their homes when they came under attack by government forces. Ethnic, religious, and racial minorities are too often targets of persecution, and they make up a large share of the world’s refugees.

Ensuring that people have access to food and can build longer-term food security is vital to a peace that will last. History shows that in post-conflict situations, which are delicate by nature, hunger increases the risk that fighting will flare up again. Read more from Chapter 5: Fragility.

U.S. Communities Left Behind

Structural racism is a stark reality in the United States—and it persists despite civil rights protections and progress against institutional and interpersonal forms of racism. It is maintained by public policies that are the antithesis of those needed to build a more equitable society. Because these policies were put in place deliberately, they will not just melt away—they must be dismantled. The fact that steps needed to accomplish this have not been taken explains why people of color remain far more likely to live with poverty and food insecurity than whites.

Securing and protecting everyone’s right to a living wage, safe and affordable housing, and a quality education should be at the top of the national agenda for reversing structural racism and ending hunger.

Fragility looks different in the United States than in the international context, where “fragile states” usually suffer from some combination of high rates of hunger and malnutrition, conflict, vulnerability to shocks such as natural disaster, and weak governance. As a nation, the United States does not fit into this category.

Some communities in the United States are more vulnerable to fragility. The reasons for this vary. Neighborhoods where many residents are immigrants, particularly immigrants from Latin America, may suffer due to the difficulty undocumented people have in finding work, the constant threat of being detained and deported, and the difficulties faced by family members who remain when a parent and/or breadwinner is deported.

Other communities that could be described as fragile, are those disproportionately affected by the nationwide opioid epidemic.

While the epidemic is not confined to rural areas, the Rust Belt, or low-income communities, poverty only exacerbates the impact of opioid overdoses on a community. This is particularly true since those affected tend to be younger and therefore likelier to be parents of young children and breadwinners.

Some communities in the United States are delineated as areas of “persistent poverty,” meaning that they have had poverty rates of 20 percent or higher for the past 30 years. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture identified 353 persistent poverty counties, the majority of which are non-metro. Even worse, 708 counties had persistent child poverty.³²

Other U.S. communities have extremely high poverty rates, but do not meet the definition of a “persistent” poverty area because they do not have a 30-year history. “Concentrated” poverty is a term used by researchers to refer to communities with poverty rates of 40 percent or higher. People of color who live with poverty are far more likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty than white people who live with poverty. About half of U.S. residents with incomes below the poverty line are white, but they make up less than 20 percent of the residents of areas of concentrated poverty. Among people living in poverty, Latinos are more than three times as likely to be living in communities of concentrated poverty as whites, and African Americans are almost five times as likely.³³

Some communities are both areas of persistent poverty and areas of concentrated poverty.34 Often, these are African American neighborhoods with intergenerational poverty. African American communities of concentrated poverty are a product of structural racism: laws, policies, and systems of segregation. They have high poverty rates, are excluded from the larger economic and social spheres, and receive little attention and few resources from government. Even after segregation was no longer legally allowed, policies such as redlining in the real estate industry and racial discrimination in wages and benefits kept communities largely segregated and marginalized.

This has contributed to residents having less power and fewer resources. The consequences can be deadly. For example, hazardous waste facilities are nearly twice as likely to be sited near communities of color.35 More than 30 years ago, in 1987, the United Church of Christ (UCC) Commission for Racial Justice published Toxic Waste and Race in the United States, the seminal research study detailing the scope of environmental racism in the United States. But little has changed since its publication. More recently, climate change has opened new frontiers of environmental racism.³⁶

In Flint, Michigan, where the majority of residents are African American, authorities refused for more than a year to investigate reports of unsafe drinking water. Elected officials were under pressure to cut costs because of the city’s dire economic situation, so they were reluctant to acknowledge any problems with the new, less expensive source for the city’s water they had adopted.

Flint’s water proved to be contaminated with high levels of lead. Lead is particularly dangerous to children and to pregnant women because it can cause learning disabilities and birth defects.³⁷

Flint is not unique—similar water contamination situations have been identified in many other U.S. communities of concentrated poverty. Children of color nationwide, especially African Americans, are at higher risk of lead contamination than white children.³⁸

Communities of color in metro areas also have less access to fresher, healthier foods because there are fewer supermarkets, particularly in African American communities.³⁹

Some children have very few opportunities to eat healthy food apart from meals through the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program. Although eligible families can receive benefits to buy food through federal nutrition programs such as WIC and SNAP, this does not solve the problem shared by many people in concentrated poverty areas: living far from a supermarket without access to reliable transportation.

Living in a community of concentrated poverty also exposes people to racism deeply ingrained in every level of the U.S. criminal justice system. People of color, particularly those who live in low-income communities, face much higher odds of being stopped, fined, arrested, and incarcerated for minor offenses.40 More blacks than whites are serving time for a felony, yet whites with felony convictions outnumber blacks with felony convictions by 1 million people.41 Residents of communities where many, if not, most people know someone who has been the victim of an unjustified arrest or police violence are far less likely to turn to police for security. Yet often the police are the only recourse available—for example, to victims of domestic violence.

A 2018 research report estimated the cost of child poverty in the United States to be about $1 trillion annually. More than a third of this figure is attributed to crime and incarceration.⁴² Family members and larger communities of people who are incarcerated pay the highest price. For example, two-thirds of families with an incarcerated family member struggle to meet basic needs such as food and housing,⁴³ and children growing up in a family with an incarcerated parent are at greater risk of being homeless⁴⁴ and of dropping out of school.⁴⁵

As the size of the U.S. prison population has exploded in recent decades, communities of color have suffered devastating losses of human capital. There are significant costs in dollars when the incomes and income-earning potential of large numbers of men and, increasingly, women are taken from a community. The losses in parental time and attention are incalculable. After serving time in prison or jail, people often return to low-income communities and/or communities of color. More than 620,000 people are released from state and federal prisons annually,46 and nearly 11 million people cycle out of local jails each year.⁴⁷ Their job prospects are dismal. Even when the national unemployment rate is low, the unemployment rate among people of color is twice that of whites. The stigma of a criminal record—or even just an arrest—and barriers associated with living in a low-income neighborhood, such as poor access to transportation, can make finding a job all but impossible.

A report by the Brookings Institution found that nearly half of the formerly incarcerated men in the study had no reported earnings one year after release.48 Racial and gender inequities follow people post-incarceration, reducing their ability to earn enough to provide for themselves and their families. Black women and men are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed post-incarceration as their white counterparts. Black women are the most disadvantaged, relegated to lower-paying fields and overrepresentation in part-time work.⁴⁹

Statistical evidence on food insecurity among formerly incarcerated people is limited to studies of relatively small sample sizes, but the data we do have is shocking. For example, a study by the National Institutes of Health found a food insecurity rate of 91 percent among people recently released from prison.⁵⁰ Addressing inequities among returning citizens will have a significant impact on hunger in the United States. Read more from Chapter 5: Fragility.

Endnotes for Chapter 5: Fragility

1. 1. World Food Program (May 24, 2018). “We can’t end hunger if we don’t end conflict.”

1. 1. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO (2017), The State of Food Security and Nutrition: Building resilience for peace and food security.

1. 1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2016), Peace and Food Security: Investing in resilience to sustain rural livelihoods amid conflict.

1. 1. Food Security Information Network (2018), Global Report on Food Crises 2018

1. UNHCR: Refugee Statistics.
2. ( … )
3. View all report endnotes  

Print or Download Report Materials

2019 Hunger Report Executive Summary
Ending hunger is within reach. 2030 sounds audacious. But decades of victory over hunger, despite recent setbacks, reveal a different picture. It is rapid global progress, not any one which persuades us that ending hunger and malnutrition is possible sooner rather than later.

Christian Study Guide
The study guide offers a biblically-based tool to explore God’s call to protect vulnerable people in the 21st century. The guide summarizes the report’s overall themes and provides discussion questions and group activities on select topics in the report.

Introduction: Ending Hunger is Within Reach
A national effort to end hunger could bring our country together and this goal has in fact, already brought the world together. Ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030 is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 by the governments of 193 countries, including the United States, with support from their civil society and business sectors.

Chapter 1: Livelihoods
The only way to end hunger with dignity is to enable people to earn the income they need to provide enough healthy food for themselves and their children.

Chapter 2: Nutrition
Maternal and child nutrition is a critical factor in healthy human development. Nutrition is a lifelong necessity for the health and well-being of individuals, their communities, and ultimately their countries.

Chapter 3: Gender
Women in every society are treated as less valuable and/or less capable. Women and girls are the largest group of marginalized people. Yet food security is dependent on them.

Chapter 4: Climate Change
Populations that are most affected by the impact of climate change are those most likely to be hungry. Climate change is the biggest barrier to ending hunger once and for all.

Chapter 5: Fragility
When marginalized groups or people living in extreme poverty turn to violence, hunger is very often an underlying factor. Hunger is both a cause and an effect of the violence associated with fragile environments.

Religious Leaders’ Statement
“As followers of Christ, we believe it is possible to build the moral and political will to end hunger by 2030. The world has made unprecedented progress against hunger, poverty, and disease in recent decades. The United States has made progress more slowly than many other countries, but it is feasible to end hunger here, too.” — excerpt from religious leaders’ statement

Hunger Report Sponsors
Co-Publisher: Margaret Wallhagen and Bill Strawbridge; Partners: American Baptist Churches USA World Relief, American Baptist Home Mission Societies, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Christian Women Connection, Church of the Brethren, Community of Christ, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Covenant World Relief/Evangelical Covenant Church, Evangelical Covenant Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Growing Hope Globally, Independent Presbyterian Church Foundation, International Orthodox Christian Charities, National Baptist Convention, USA, INC, Society of African Missions, United Church of Christ, Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church