850m go to bed hungry every night, says UN

DESPITE international efforts to reduce poverty, hunger is on the rise again after falling steadily during the first half of the 1990s, according to a report by the UN food agency.

Nearly 850 million people go to bed hungry every night, the vast majority in Africa and Asia, and the number of undernourished people in the developing world is climbing at a rate of almost five million a year, it said.

“The State of Food Insecurity in the World,” an annual report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, paints a grim picture of a failing global campaign against hunger.

The latest estimates from 1999-2001 “signal a setback in the war on hunger,” the report said.

The prospect of meeting the UN goal of cutting in half the number of malnourished people by 2015 appears “increasingly remote,” the report stated.

“The goal can only be reached if the recent trend of increasing numbers is reversed,” said FAO Assistant Director-General Hartwig de Haen.

“The annual reductions must be accelerated to 26 million per year, more than 12 times the pace of two million per year achieved during the 1990s,” he said.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation said it was time for nations to examine why hundreds of millions of people went hungry in a world that produced more than enough food for every man, woman and child.

“Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will,” the report said.