World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty. If efforts are only directed at providing food, or improving food production or distribution, then the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency would still remain. 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world). 2  640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).
A catalyst is a substance which speeds up a reaction, but is chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction. When the reaction has finished, you would have exactly the same mass of catalyst as you had at the beginning.
Catalysts make such a breaking and rebuilding happen more efficiently. They do this by lowering the activation energy for the chemical reaction. Activation energy is the amount of energy needed to allow the chemical reaction to occur. The catalyst just changes the path to the new chemical partnership.