The Food and Agriculture Organisation recently released its 2010 statistics concerning global undernourishment and said that the overall figure has dropped for the first time in 15 years. However, this welcome drop should only be viewed alongside the harsh truth that last year’s statistic was a record high.
As of this year, some 925 million people are undernourished, while last year, the figure stood at 1.02 billion.
This is why the FAO emphasized that the new number of hungry people in the world is far from the ultimate goal.
There are eight social goals agreed by the 189 U.N. member states in 2000, one of which included halving the proportion of people who suffered from hunger in 1990 by the year 2015.
In 2010, however, people living under conditions of extreme hunger make up 16 percent of the world’s population, while in 1990, about 20 percent of the population was undernourished.
“The fact that nearly a billion people remain hungry even after the recent food and financial crises have largely passed indicates a deeper structural problem,” the FAO remarked in its report.
“Governments should encourage increased investment in agriculture, expand safety nets and social assistance programs, and enhance income-generating activities for the rural and urban poor,” the agency recommended.
David Beckmann of Bread for the World, explained in a press conference on Monday that most people who are hungry are simply so because they are poor.
“Globally, we tend to focus on these disaster situation and they are important,” said Beckmann, who worked at the World Bank for 15 years. “But 95 percent of the hungry people are just out in remote Mozambique [for example] and they’re just damn poor and kids just die and there are no TV cameras. That’s the way it’s always been.”
Beckmann, who is a 2010 World Food Prize laureate, said that both individuals and companies should not only donate, but also advocate strenuously on behalf of the hungry and poor, since so much of world hunger is caused by structural problems.
An ActionAid report released this week stated that out of the 28 developing countries it studied, the majority were failing to halve hunger by 2015.