These four sources indicate that hunger costs the United States economy around $224.6 billion a year.
| Datapoint | Source | Value | Type | Year | | Foregone GDP Growth | The Perryman Group | $461.9 billion | Estimate | 2014 | | Minimum Total Cost Burden | Brown, Shephard, Martin, & Orwat 2007 | $90 Billion | Minimum Cost Estimate | 2007 | | Costs Attributable to Food Insecurity and Hunger, 2014 |2016 Hunger Report | $179 Billion | Estimate | 2014 | | Hunger in America: Suffering we All Pay For | Shepard, Setren, and Cooper 2011 | $167.5 Billion | Estimate | 2010 |
This estimate set out to determine the absolute minimum cost of hunger to the United States Economy.
Official definitions of hunger are perhaps too conservative. In 1995, The US Government defined hunger as a “painful sensation” in the stomach, and the measure of it reflects a high degree of food deprivation or “insecurity” before a household actually is considered to experience hunger.
Some nutritionists and medical experts consider this standard to be too high. Since “pain” is only one of the possible sensations from hunger, many victims of hunger do not actually feel pain as such. People can be chronically hungry by any common understanding of the term, yet be missed by the federal definition because they do not experience “a painful sensation.”
Hunger costs the economy $461.9 billion in total expenditures, $221.9 billion in gross product each year, and nearly 2.5 million permanent jobs.
These amounts represent about 1.3% of total output in the United States and 1.8% of total domestic employment, thus reflecting a significant drain on current business activity. It should be noted that the lifetime effects of hunger occurring in 2014 alone (as opposed to the impacts in a typical year as described above) are much larger and include almost $3.4 trillion in aggregate spending, over $1.5 trillion in gross product, and 15.9 million years of employment.
17.5 million US households (almost 50 million people) had difficulty obtaining sufficient food last year, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reoport on household food security in the United States released in September 2014.
While the Board, largely comprised of physicians and clergy, was unable to estimate precisely how many individuals were impacted, they placed the number somewhere above 10 million people.
One even suggested that the number was well above 30 million (Bregglio, 1992), a figure later corroborated by the university-based Center on Hunger and Poverty in 19922, which had been consulted by Congressional leaders as to the true extent of domestic hunger.