217 Million Indians Malnourished

Bangalore: The number of people in hunger worldwide has been revised and shows a downward trend from 1 billion to 870 million as of 2010-12. The three key international organizations working on food security that made the revision say that their methodology was faulty and partly the problem was that they had overvalued the impact of the financial crisis on developing nations like India, reported Rukmini Shrinivasan for TNN.

In 2009, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) had announced that the number of hungry people in the world had gone up sharply and had for the first time crossed 1 billion. However, the new numbers show that the number of malnourished people in the world have instead been falling constantly since 1990. The ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World’ is an annual report brought out jointly by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The revision as of 1990 has also considerably shifted the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of undernourished people in a country by 2015. The FAO recently announced that it was raising its estimate for undernourishment in 1990 to 23.2 percent, which makes the 2015 goal of 11.6 percent much more achievable.