Skip to content

Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022

Could 3% of US military spending end global starvation?

Jacob Alabab-Moser, Gigafact
yes

A United Nations agency calculates that global starvation could be significantly ameliorated with less than 1% of the sum the U.S. annually spends on its military.

The World Food Program, the food-assistance branch of the U.N., released a plan last November to combat famine. It identified 42 million people across 43 countries at risk of starvation and found that it would cost $6.6 billion to feed each of them "one meal a day, the basic needed to survive," for one year. This price tag is 0.9% of the latest U.S. military budget of $768.2 billion.

A broader study published in October 2020 found that it would require $33 billion a year to end hunger globally—about 4% of the U.S. military budget.  

The UN agency noted that hunger is on the rise due to "widespread conflicts, growing climate crises and the economic fallout of COVID- 19," increasing 110% from 2019. 

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.