Thursday 25 August 2011

Food Crisis in World.


FAO Report
Food and Agricultural Organisations and United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said in its report that the number of hungry people in the world remains unacceptably high despite expected recent gains that have pushed the figure below 1 billion. The new estimate of the number of people who will suffer chronic hunger this year is 925 million—98 million down from 1.023 billion in 2009. But with a child dying in every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems, hunger remains the world’s largest tragedy and scandal. The continuing high global hunger level makes it extremely difficult to achieve not only the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) but also the rest of MDGs. The recent increase in food prices, if they persists, could hamper efforts to further reduce the number of world’s hungry. It is ironic that the majority of them actually live in rural areas of developing countries. Indeed over 70% of the world’s extremely poor (those people who live on less than US Dollar one a day) live in rural areas. That’s a billion people, and four out of five of them are farmers to some extent or the other. Globally, the 2010 hunger figure marked a decline of 9.6% from the 2009 level. The reduction was mostly concentrated in Asia, where 80 million people were estimated to be going hungry this year. In sub-Saharan Africa the drop was much smaller (about 12 million) and one out of three people there would continue to be undernourished.

Some of the Key findings are :

Two thirds of the world’s undernourished live in just seven countries of (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, China and India).

The region with the most undernourished people continues to be Asia and The Pacific with 578 million.

The proportion of undernourished people remains highest in sub-Saharan Africa at 30% in 2010, or 239 million.

Progress varies widely at country level. As of 2005-2007 the Congo, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria had already achieved MDG 1 in sub-Saharan Africa; Ethiopia and others are close to achieving it. However, the proportion of undernourished rose to 69% in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Asia, Armenia, Mayanmar and Vietnam had already achieved MDG 1 and China is close to doing so.

In Latin America and Caribbean, Guyana, Jamaica and Nicaragua had already achieved MDG 1 while Brazil is coming close.

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