The number of global hungry has declined by nearly 10 percent, the first drop in the number of undernourished since 1995, the UN food agency said in its annual report on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
A total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010 compared with 1.023 billion last year, revealing a drop of 9.6 percent, according to the FAO report to be published in full in October.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut with a child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems, hunger remains the world\u2019s largest tragedy and scandal,\u201d said the Food and Agriculture Organisation\u2019s (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf.<\/p>\n
Some 98 percent of the world\u2019s hungry live in developing countries, and over 40 percent of those in China and India alone.<\/p>\n
Diouf, who introduced the report in Rome, said the continuing high global hunger level \u201cmakes it extremely difficult to achieve not only the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) but also the rest of the MDGs\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said the target to halve the world\u2019s hungry by 2015 was \u201cat serious risk,\u201d adding that recent increases in food prices could hamper efforts to pare down the number futher.<\/p>\n
Recent food crises like that which hit Niger in West Africa, where seven million people are threatened by famine, have also affected the downward trend.<\/p>\n
Other flashpoints include Pakistan, where floods devastated much of the country\u2019s farmland, and Russia, where drought destroyed a quarter of crops and forced the world\u2019s number three exporter of wheat to ban grain exports.<\/p>\n
The Rome-based food agency urged governments to \u201cencourage increased investment in agriculture, expand safety nets and social assistance programmes, and enhance income-generating activities for the rural and urban poor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLack of appropriate mechanisms to deal with the shocks or to protect the most vulnerable populations from their effects result in large swings in hunger following crises,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
The FAO said the decline in the number of hungry could be explained mostly by a more favourable economic environment in 2010, particularly in developing countries, as well as a drop in both international and domestic food prices since 2008.<\/p>\n
However, \u201cthe fact that nearly a billion people remain hungry, even after the recent food and financial crises have largely passed, indicates a deeper structural problem,\u201d the FAO report said.<\/p>\n
Leading global aid agencies and charities were reserved in their response to the report, warning that there was still much work to be done to achieve the 2015 figure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is no time to relax. We must keep hunger on the run to ensure stability and to protect lives and dignity,\u201d said World Food Programme director Josette Sheeran.<\/p>\n
ActionAid said the goal to halve hunger \u201cis decades off track\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oxfam said the decline in the number of global hungry was due to \u201cluck\u201d. \u201cWe know it is possible\u201d to achieve the 2015 goal, Oxfam said, but \u201cpolitical will is the only element missing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Asia and Pacific region has the highest number of hungry people, but with a 12 percent decline from 658 million in 2009 to 578 million, it also accounts for most of the global improvement expected in 2010.<\/p>\n
The proportion of undernourished people remains highest in sub-Saharan Africa, at 30 percent.<\/p>\n
The figures from the report on food insecurity to be jointly published with the World Food Programme have been released ahead of a September 20-22 summit meeting in New York on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The number of global hungry has declined by nearly 10 percent, the first drop in the number of undernourished since 1995, the UN food agency said in its annual report on Tuesday. A total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010 compared with 1.023 billion last year, revealing a drop of 9.6 percent, according […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}