UN: Hunger kills six million children a year

Hunger and malnutrition are killing 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 today.

Many of the children – the figure roughly equals the whole pre-school population of a large country such as Japan – die from diseases that are treatable, 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 203.5 million people in 2000-2002 from 170.4 million 10 years earlier, the report states, noting that hunger and malnutrition were among the main causes of poverty, illiteracy, disease and deaths in developing countries.

The UN food agency warned that 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 still 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 had a good chance of reaching the targets “if it can accelerate progress slightly over the next few years.”

FAO estimated last year that about 850 million people worldwide were undernourished during the 2000-2002 period. However, this year’s report does not provide an update on the number of hungry people. New estimates will be released next year, the report said.

“Most, if not all of the … targets can be reached, but only if efforts are redoubled and refocused,” 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.”

The report states that providing children with adequate food is crucial for breaking the cycle of hunger and poverty, and ways to combat hunger include economic growth, investing in agriculture, political stability peace, better education for children and improving the situation of women. Wars also disrupt agricultural production and access to food.

Having proper infrastructure in rural regions – for instance good roads – also is key to fighting the scourge of hunger, the FAO said.

US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, on a visit to Rome to meet with FAO and Italian officials, said 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 six million people a year, hit the hungry and poor the hardest, according to the FAO 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.

“Reducing hunger should become the driving force for progress and hope, as improved nutrition fuels better health, increased school attendance, reduces child and maternal mortality, empowers women and lowers the incidence of mortality rates of HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis,” Diouf wrote.

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