Nearly six million children a year dying of malnutrition

HUNGER and malnutrition kill nearly six million children a year, and more people are malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa this decade than in the 1990s, according to a UN report released yesterday.

Many of the children die from treatable diseases, including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles, said the report by the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of malnourished people grew to 203.5m in 2000-02 from 170.4m 10 years earlier, the report states, noting that hunger and malnutrition are among the main causes of poverty, illiteracy, disease and deaths in developing countries.

The UN food agency said the goal of reducing the number of the world’s hungry by half by the year 2015, set by the World Food Summit in 1996 and reinforced by the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, remains distant but attainable.

“If each of the developing regions continues to reduce hunger at the current pace, only South America and the Caribbean will reach the Millennium Development Goal target,” Jacques Diouf, the agency’s director-general, wrote in the report, the agency’s annual update on world hunger.

The food agency said the Asia-Pacific region also has a good chance of reaching the targets “if it can accelerate progress slightly over the next few years.”

“Most, if not all of the ... targets can be reached, but only if efforts are redoubled and refocused,” Mr Diouf said. “To bring the number of hungry people down, priority must be given to rural areas and to agriculture as the mainstay of rural livelihoods.”

US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, on a visit to Rome to meet with FAO and Italian officials, said that free trade and economic growth were key to fighting hunger.

“We have world goals in terms of reducing hunger, and in terms of long-term prospects, it really does involve the ability of countries to engage in economic relationships with each other,” he said. “We want economies around the world to improve, that is really what’s going to provide the long term stable base upon which people are let out of poverty.”

Diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, which kill more than 6m people a year, hit the hungry and poor the hardest, according to the report’s findings. Millions of families are pushed deeper into poverty and hunger by the illness and death of breadwinners, the cost of health care, paying for funerals and support of orphans.

About 75% of the world’s hungry and poor live in rural areas in poor countries, the report found.