World Hunger, by Maansi & Ellie

December 20, 2020

Project Peanut Butter offers hope to malnourished children in Malawi, Sierra Leone, Botswana, and Rwanda. To date, they have helped more than 6 million. Project Peanut Butter helps almost 600 malnourished kids every day for no charge. Project Peanut Butter uses locally produced ready-to-use therapeutic foods, a mixture of nuts, sugar, vitamins, and minerals, to help malnourished kids. In about two weeks families see a huge improvement. Hunger and malnutrition are in fact the number one risk to health worldwide. When a kid is malnourished, it means that the kid does not get enough nutrients to be healthy.

When Project Peanut Butter began over seven years ago, global hunger was threatening many vulnerable lives, especially children. Now in 2020, more than half of those lives have been saved, but the other half we are still working on. Mary Child from the association JOIN from Portland to China says, "The causes of hunger range from poverty all the way to climate change." This means that hunger not only affects the poor, it also affects people who farm, and who grow the world's food! If we don't react to bring down the worldwide temperature, it may become too warm to produce the world's staple foods like rice, wheat, and barley.

In the United Nations 1 in 8 kids are undernourished. "Global Hunger in 2013 threatened more than 19 million lives of children," says Louis Joans, director of UNICEF, "and 3.5 million of those children die." World hunger affects all ages, all races, as well as the minds of kids. Hunger also affects how kids act, because malnourished people are tired, and these people lack the energy to perform daily tasks.

We interviewed Emily Smith from the Oregon Food Bank, and she told us that hunger is happening right here in Oregon, where hundreds of thousands of our neighbors are struggling invisibly every day. The main cause of hunger is poverty. People who are in poverty can not afford food so they don't end up with anything to eat.

Of course, climate change is a related problem because it ruins harvests, which forces the price of staple foods up, so the poor cannot afford to buy the rice and bread they once could afford.

Project Peanut Butter encourages U.S. citizens to donate to help the world's hungry, and at the same time, they partner with organizations like JOIN from Portland to China, UNICEF, and the Oregon Food Bank to encourage us all to reduce our carbon footprint so that the world's farmers can produce the food that we all need to survive.

http://www.projectpeanutbutter.org/