More than 1 billion people go to bed hungry every day as the deadly combination of severe food shortages and one of the worst global financial crises in living memory has shrunk food aid to an all-time low, says a UN body
“The combination of food and economic crises has pushed the number of hungry people worldwide to historic levels. More than 1 billion people are undernourished,” the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates in its ‘Annual Hunger Report-2009’, produced in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP). The report comes ahead of World Food Day on Friday.
A bulk of the starving population belongs to the developing world, with Asia and the Pacific region estimated to have about 642 million hungry people in 2009, sub-Saharan Africa 265 million, Latin America and the Caribbean 53 million, and the Near East and North Africa 42 million, the report says.
“This represents more hungry people than at any time since 1970 and a worsening of the unsatisfactory trends that were present even before the economic crisis. 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,” according to the report.
Targets to cut the number of hungry people in the world to fulfil pledges like the UN Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve the number of people living in hunger and poverty by 2015, will not be met without greater international effort, the UN food agency warns. “No nation is immune and, as usual, it is the poorest countries and the poorest people that are suffering the most. Asia and the Pacific have the largest number of hungry people.”
The report, released in Rome on October 15, 2009, says the economic downturn has reduced foreign aid and investment in poorer countries and cut remittances from those working abroad. It says the loss of income is compounded by food prices that are “still relatively high”.
UN agencies are urging international investment in agriculture, and economic safety nets for poorer countries, “despite financial constraints faced by governments around the world”. The survey suggests that empowering more women in developing countries through education and better access to jobs is a key to reducing world hunger.
“In the fight against hunger, the focus should be on increasing food production,” FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said. “It’s commonsense… that agriculture would be given the priority, but the opposite has happened.” In 1980, 17% of aid contributed by donor countries went to agriculture. That share was down to 3.8% in 2006 and has only slightly improved in the last three years, Diouf said.
The decline may have been caused by low food prices that discouraged private investment in agriculture, and competition for public funds from other aid fields including emergency relief, debt reduction, and helping set up institutions and improving government practices, said FAO economist David Dawe.
Agriculture may look “less sexy” because of its slower growth rate, but it still needs sustained investment to feed people in developing countries, Dawe said. Keith Wiebe, another FAO economist, said: Until recently, “there was still the idea that agriculture is something you move quickly out of in the course of development”.
The FAO, which is to host a world food summit next month, says global food output will have to increase by 70% to feed a projected population of 9.1 billion in 2050. To achieve that, poor countries will need $44 billion yearly of aid to agriculture, compared with the current $7.9 billion, to increase access to irrigation systems, modern machinery, as well as to build roads, and train farmers.
Source: Press Trust of India, October 15, 2009
Associated Press, October 15, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk, October 2009
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