850 million people still hungry

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

“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.”

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.

Except when wars or natural disasters briefly put a spotlight on developing countries, “little is said and less is done” to end the plight of the 798 million people in the developing world who suffer from chronic hunger – a figure that outnumbers the total population of Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa, the FAO said.

Another 11 million people in the developed people and 34 million in countries in transition are undernourished, it said.

At the UN World Food Summit in 1996, governments set a goal of cutting in half the number of undernourished people by 2015 and used the period 1990-1992 as a baseline. At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 – the largest gathering of world leaders in history – this goal went to the top of the list of global priorities.

According to the FAO report, during the first half of the 1990s, the number of chronically hungry people decreased by 37 million. But since the 1995-1997 period, the number has increased by 18 million.