The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says one in eight people on the planet suffer from chronic undernourishment.
The ‘hunger count’ of 870 million people was a sharp reduction from the earlier estimate of more than 1 billion chronically hungry or starving people because of a recalculation of data.
But the number of hungry people in a world in which there is enough food to feed them remains too high, UN leaders said last week.
The Millennium Development Goal established in the 1990s called for a reduction in the then-800 million hungry to 400 million by 2015.
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Instead, the number has grown and the UN warned last week that the current economic slowdown could make the hunger count worse.
“In today’s world of unprecedented technical and economic opportunities, we find it entirely unacceptable that more than 100 million children under five are underweight and therefore unable to realize their full human and socio-economic potential and that childhood malnutrition is a cause of death for more than 2.5 million every year,” senior UN officials said in the introduction to the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 report published Oct. 9.
Most of the world’s hungry live in developing countries although the UN says that 16 million people in developed countries are chronically under-nourished.
