Define the Poverty and hunger - mutually causes, devastating effects?
Measures of food deprivation, nutrition and poverty are strongly correlated. Countries with a high prevalence of undernourishment also have high' prevalence of stunted and underweight children. In these countries, a high percentage of the population lives in conditions of extreme poverty. In countries where a high proportion of the population is undernourished, a comparably high proposition struggles to survive on less than US$1 per day. While poverty is undoubtedly a cause of hunger, hunger can also be a cause of poverty. Hunger often deprives impoverished people of the one valuable resource they can call their own: the strength and skill to work productively. Numerous studies have confirmed that hunger seriously impairs 'the ability of the poor to develop their skills and reduces the productivity of their labour.
Hunger in childhood impairs mental and physical growth, crippling the capacity to learn and earn. Evidence from household food surveys in developing countries shows that adults with smaller and slighter body frames caused by undernourishment earn lower wages in jobs involving physical labour. Other studies have found that a 1 percent increase in the Body Mass Index (BMI, a measure of weight over height square) is associated with an increase of more than 2 percent in wages for those toward the lower end of the BMI range. Micronutrient deficiencies can also reduce work capacity. Surveys suggest that iron deficiency anaemia reduces productivity of manual labourers by up to 17 percent. As a result, hungry and malnourished adults earn lower wages. And they are frequently unable to work as many hours or years as well-nourished people, as they fall sick more often and have shorter life spans. This then brings us to the issue of economic consequences of malnutrition.