When I look at the state our world is in currently, it really makes me mad and I start questioning whether we have failed our own species. Despite all our technologies and all our advancements, we still haven’t been able to solve some of the most basic problems that any civilisation can have.

If you take a look at the world, you will see a great divide. The differences in the lives of people from one part of the world to the other, is so staggeringly huge, that for once, you will start questioning how that can be possible.

And I don’t mean cultural differences. I don’t even mean lifestyle differences. What I mean is the difference in the state of fulfilment of even the basic needs. Food, clothes and shelter are the basic needs of any human and among these, food and water are the most important.

Today, 1 in 9 people in the world, is suffering from chronic undernourishment and it’s a huge failure of our civilisation, that despite having the means at our disposal, such is the reality of our world.

World Hunger - Some Facts

The total population of the world is around 7.3 billion people. Of these, there are around 795 million people, who are in a state of hunger, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation.

That is a lot of hungry people. There are two reasons which are affected the most in terms of the numbers and they are Africa and Asia. Africa has 232.5 million people, or 1 in 5, that are undernourished and Asia has 511.7 million people, or about 1 in 8 people, that are hungry.

Even in the developed parts of the world, there are 14.7 million people affected by a lack of nourishment which is around 1 in 20 people. So, as you can see, the situation is pretty dire!

All this is despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed every single one of us. Food availability has improved quite a bit from just a decades ago, inspite of the expanding world population, but the major problem is that people just don’t have sufficient income to buy that food and this is where my next point comes in.

War - A Black Hole For Funds

I came across a video on Youtube that was talking about the insane amount of money that the different countries of the world were spending on their military, and I was left disgusted.

According to a list by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the total world military expenditure for 2016, was $1.68 trillion dollars. Yes, with a capital T!!

Now, I am not saying that all of this spending is a total waste. Of course, countries would want to keep themselves safe in case of any turmoil or even for strategic advantages or influence in the geopolitical landscape.

But, if you take a look at the numbers, you just can’t help but feel that it is just too much and the world would be a much better place if even a percentage of that spending could be allocated towards solving world hunger or world poverty, which is really the root of all other problems.

There is a popular meme that goes around social media that it would take $30 billion per year, every year, to solve world hunger. Most experts believe that, that number is too low and there isn’t any ways of measuring the exact number it would take.

But, even if the number is say, double that, and it would take like $60 or even $100 billion a year, to solve the problem, or mitigate it by a considerable amount, wouldn’t that take just a little bit of reallocation of funds? I mean if the world came together on this, and instead of spending $1.68 billion on their militaries and “only” spent $1.58 billion, it would mean food for hundreds of millions of people!! The US alone could solve the entire world hunger problem by lowering its $611 billion in spending to $511 billion!!

It shocks me that the world is not already doing that and that is my major concern towards the direction we are headed as a species. Are we more interested in blowing people up for various agendas than a peaceful world where all are fed?