World Hunger Falls But 805 Mn Still Chronically Under-Nourished: FAO

ABU DHABI: Despite the overall progress made in global hunger reduction, 805 million people are estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2012-14, down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990-92, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.

In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries, the latest estimates by FAO show.

Despite overall progress, marked differences across regions persist. Latin America and the Caribbean have made the greatest overall progress in increasing food security while modest progress was made in sub-Saharan Africa and western Asia, which have been afflicted by natural disasters and conflict, FAO's Sub-regional Coordinator for the Gulf Cooperation Council States and Yemen, Adrianus Spijkers, said in a press conference Monday at the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) environment and water ministry to mark the launch of FAO's latest report, "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014" (SOFI 2014).

FAO says the figures demonstrate that the hunger target of the Millennium Development Goal - of halving the proportion of undernourished people in developing countries by 2015 - is within reach.

The FAO representative noted that since 1990-92, 63 countries have reached the hunger target of Millennium Development Goal, MDG-1, and 25 countries have achieved the more stringent World Food Summit (WFS)'s target.

Of the 63 developing countries, 11 already had undernourishment levels below 5 percent (the methodological limit that can assure significance of the results different from zero) in 1990-1992 and have been able to keep it in that level, and are therefore not the prime focus of FAO's 2014 report.

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