Number of those chronically hungry in Africa declines

Hunger across the globe continues to decline, and now a new hunger report indicates hunger is dropping in Africa.

by John Tyburski

Copyright © Daily Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published at Daily Digest News on September 16, 2014

The number of hungry people in the world is dropping, according to new estimates. Approximately 805 million people across the globe are chronically undernourished, down by roughly 209 million from about a decade ago. Among today’s hungry are 791 million people in developing countries.

“Chronic undernourishment is a technical euphemism for being chronically hungry,” said Jose Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization. “This basically refers to inadequate dietary energy — in layman’s terms – carbohydrates. The absence of sufficient dietary energy basically deprives people of the ability to work and function and to have decent healthy lives.”

The news of a decline in the world’s hungry comes with the release of the State of Food Security in the World, or SOFI, report published by three U.N. agencies. Even so, U.N. officials say the declining numbers of hungry people still fall short of the original Millennium Development Goal of eradicating hunger and extreme poverty, which called for a 50 percent reduction by 2015.

“We basically have 15 more months to achieve the target,” said da Silva. But the actual measurement of this will be completed in about two years’ time. The only way we can achieve this target is essentially by stepping up efforts in order to have sufficient acceleration of progress in order to achieve the MDG target.”

According to the SOFI report, the proportion of hungry people in developing countries fell from 23.4 to 15.5 percent. However, da Silva cautions that success in reducing hunger has been quite uneven in the developing world.

“Progress has been greatest in Latin America, as well as in Southeast Asia. And unfortunately there has been a regression in West Asia. There has been progress in different parts of the world, but not sufficient to merit achievement of the MDG target,” he said.