Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 13

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Ending Hunger in America
Ending hunger in America is possible. It is not an impossible dream. If we decided we really wanted to do it, we
could wake up one morning in 2030 and be living in a country where hunger is rare and temporary, not the shared
experience of millions of Americans that it is in 2014.
The United States has accomplished more audacious feats than this in shorter periods of time. During the early
years of the Great Depression, for instance, few expected that New Deal reforms would reverse what was at that time
the worst period of income inequality in the nation’s history and lead to decades of more broadly shared prosperity.
The New Deal was a bold response by the U.S. government to fissures in the economy exposed by the Great
Depression. We are still waiting for a commensurate government response to the fissures exposed by the Great
Recession, which officially ended in 2009. Of course the United States is a much
different place in 2014 than it was in 1934, but arguably, the return of income inequality
“We cannot succeed
on the scale we have today—and the high poverty rates that go with it—mean that the
against hunger while
government needs to make another correction just as bold as the New Deal.
ignoring poverty,
2030 is not an arbitrary date to wake up to an America without hunger. Although
because hunger is a
most of this report is about ending hunger in the United States, it also calls on the
physical manifestation
U.S. government to work within the international community to forge a unified and
of poverty.”
universal set of global development goals to follow the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs), whose deadline is December 2015. A post-MDG agreement should include a specific goal to end hunger and
achieve food security and good nutrition in all countries by 2030. “MDG” may not be a household word in the United
States, but the MDG experience is inspirational: setting goals led to concrete progress on global poverty.

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