Junior scholastic understanding world hunger.

NORTH AMERICA--Hunger is a problem even in the U.S., where the Department of Agriculture estimates that 34.9 million people are food insecure. The problem is worst in inner cities and rural areas. In 2002, six states had food-insecurity rates of more than 14 percent: Utah, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, supermarket shelves overflow and more than 96 billion pounds of food are wasted every year. Also, the Centers for Disease Control reports that 15 percent of American children 6-19 are overweight, and 64 percent of adults are overweight or obese.

CENTRAL, AND SOUTH AMERICA--In the coffee-growing areas of Central and South America, thousands of families cannot feed themselves due to the plunging prices for coffee worldwide. In some regions of El Salvador, as many as 85 percent of children are malnourished. In Colombia, farmers are using former coffee fields to grow coca, the raw material of cocaine.

But Panama has cut its number of undernourished children in half by feeding young people in schools and teaching them to raise their own food. And in Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has vowed to eliminate hunger by 2007.

AFRICA--The hunger crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly 200 million are undernourished, has been caused by decades of drought, floods, poverty, and conflict. In war-torn countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, farming has all but stopped. Now the AIDS epidemic is devastating families and food supplies. In 2001 alone, about 2.5 million children were orphaned by AIDS and left to fend for themselves. One organization estimates that by the year 2020, AIDS will have claimed one fifth or more of the agricultural labor force in most southern African countries.

But the picture is not all bleak. Kenya's Applied Nutrition Project has helped reduce the number of malnourished children by more than 13 percent, and Sierra Leone has set a target of eliminating hunger by the year 2007.

ASIA--Fierce winters have killed millions of livestock in Mongolia, where an estimated 38 percent of the population is undernourished. In Afghanistan, 70 percent are undernourished after years of drought and conflict. Starvation in North Korea may have killed 3 million people in the last decade. Refugee problems create hunger in Iraq, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

But progress has been made by Vietnam's family-home-gardening projects and "food for work" campaigns by the World Food Program in Cambodia. And China has reduced the number of undernourished people by 74 million over the last decade.

EUROPE--Years of conflict have caused vast destruction to farms in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. War in the Russian republic of Chechnya has displaced 160,000 people, making hunger a pressing problem.