One in eight people worldwide still suffers from chronichunger, the UN’s food agency said on Tuesday, describing the figure as“unacceptable” and warning that the fight against hunger was slowing down.
“With almost 870 million people chronically undernourishedin 2010-2012, the number of hungry people in the world remains unacceptablyhigh,” the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) said in its 2012 report onfood insecurity.
The latest figures show that 12.5 percent of the world'spopulation, or one person in every eight, has yet to be relieved of chronichunger, it said.
“We live in a world of plenty which has enough food to feedeveryone. For us, the only acceptable number is zero,” FAO head Jose Grazianoda Silva told a press conference as the report was unveiled.
Oxfam's GROW campaign to fix the global food system lashedout at "government inaction".
“The fact that almost 870 million people, more than thepopulation of the US, Europe and Canada, are hungry in a world which producesenough for everyone to eat is the biggest scandal of our time,” Oxfam’s LucaChinotti said.
The Rome-based food agency, which compiled the report alongwith the World Food Programme (WFP) and International Fund for Agriculturaldevelopment (IFAD), said the number of hungry was down from one billion 20years ago.
The FAO had warned in 2009 that the number of global hungryhad broken through the one billion barrier, but in Tuesday's report it admittedthe data had been off-target and produced fresh figures for the past twodecades.
New methods for estimating hunger levels showed thatprogress against hunger in the past 20 years was “better than previouslybelieved,” it said.
“Most of the progress, however, was achieved before 2007-08.Since then, global progress in reducing hunger has slowed,” and must rallyagain to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the world's hungry by2015, it said.
The slowdown is due to multiple factors, including “theglobal economic crisis, rising food prices, the growing demand for bio-fuels,food speculation and climate change,” said Jomo Sundaram, FAO assistantdirector-general.
The vast majority of the world’s hungry -- 852 million --live in developing countries, where hunger affects 14.9 percent of thepopulation. Most sufferers live in South and East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,the report said.
While hunger rates were down annually over the past 20years, the FAO warned that “considerable differences among regions andindividual countries remain”.
The number of undernourished people has dropped sharply inEast Asia, for example, down from 261 million people in 1990-1992 to 176million in 2010-2012.
But in sub-Saharan Africa, the figure has shot up from 170million to 234 million, the report said.
“We are losing the battle in the sub-Saharan Africa, wherethe numbers of hungry are up 64 million since 20 years ago. Conflicts in NorthAfrica have led to an increase in the number of hungry there as well,” Grazianoda Silva said.
The latest figures are based on new estimates of theproportion of hungry people in the world after the FAO updated its methodology,Sundaram said.
Figures will from now on be collated over three yearperiods, he said.
