One billion people without enough food, says UN

The economic crisis has pushed the ranks of the world's hungry to a record one billion, the United Nations said today.

The rise came before declining aid and investment in agriculture had been steadily increasing the number of undernourished people for more than a decade.

Unless the trends are reversed, ambitious goals set by the international community to slash the number of hungry people by 2015 will not be met, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned in a report.

After gains in the fight against hunger in the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of undernourished people started climbing in 1995, reaching 1.02 billion this year under the combined effect of high food prices and the global financial meltdown, the agency said.

The figure topped the billion mark in June, and was 963 million a year ago.