Child dies of hunger ‘every five seconds’

MORE than eight years after a pledge to halve the number of the world’s hungry by 2015, that number has hardly budged - with one child dying of hunger every five seconds - a UN agency said yesterday.

Though the number of hungry people in developing countries fell in the early 1990s, that trend was later reversed, the Food and Agriculture Organisation said in its annual report on world hunger.

By 2000-2002 the figure stood at 815 million, just nine million below the decade-earlier estimate.