#1 According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the number of “least developed countries” has doubled over the past 40 years.
#2 “Least developed countries” spent 9 billion dollars on food imports in 2002. By 2008, that number had risen to 23 billion dollars.
#3 Average income per person in the poorest countries on the continent of Africa has fallen by one-fourth over the past twenty years.
#4 Bill Gates has a net worth of somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars. That means that there are approximately 140 different nations that have a yearly GDP which is smaller than the amount of money Bill Gates has.
#5 A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research discovered that the bottom half of the world population owns approximately 1 percent of all global wealth.
#6 Approximately 1 billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry each night.
#7 The wealthiest 2 percent own more than half of all global household assets.
#8 It is estimated that over 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where the income gap between the rich and the poor is widening.
#9 Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death and three-quarters of them are children under the age of 5.
#10 According to Gallup, 33 percent of the people on the globe say that they do not have enough money for food.
#11 As you read this, there are 2.6 billion people around the world that lack basic sanitation.
#12 According to the most recent “Global Wealth Report” by Credit Suisse, the wealthiest 0.5% control over 35% of the wealth of the world.
#13 More than 3 billion people, close to half the world’s population, live on less than 2 dollar a day.
#14 CNN founder Ted Turner is the largest private landowner in the United States. Today, Turner owns approximately two million acres. That is an amount greater than the land masses of the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Turner also advocates restricting U.S. couples to 2 or fewer children to control population growth.
#15 There are 400 million children in the world today that have no access to safe water.
#16 Approximately 28 percent of all children in developing countries are considered to be underweight or have had their growth stunted as a result of malnutrition.
#17 It is estimated that the United States owns approximately 25 percent of the total wealth of the world.
#18 It is estimated that the entire continent of Africa owns approximately 1 percent of the total wealth of the world.
#19 In 2008, approximately 9 million children died before they reached their fifth birthdays. Approximately a third of all of these deaths was due either directly or indirectly to lack of food.
