The cost of ending hunger globally is less than the value of wasted food only in the US, and orders of magnitude smaller than the Wall Street bailout.

"The world only needs 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger."

FAO Newsroom. 2008

"14-15 per cent of United States edible food is untouched or unopened, amounting to $43 billion worth of discarded, but edible, food".

Wikipedia quoting a study by the University of Arizona in 2004

 During the last quarter of 2008, central banks purchased US$2.5 trillion of government debt and troubled private assets from banks. This was the largest liquidity injection into the credit market, and the largest monetary policy action, in world history.

Wikipedia, "Late 2000s financial crisis"

Bernard Amadei mentioned this numbers at the Opening keynote of EWB-USA conference (I hope they upload the video soon). I got curious and I check the numbers. Then it occurred to me to divide that cost among us, the ones who have the most, and I found out that:

The cost of ending hunger is 26$ per year per person for those living in a high income country.

To get this number I took the population data and GDPpc. Then I ordered the countries by Income and divided the 30 billion $ by the aggregated population of countries ordered by GDPpc. If you want multiply that number by 10 to reflect the case where only the top 10% of the population would give. Wouldn’t you give 260$ a year to end hunger in the world?

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