Hunger Affects 1.02 Billion People Worldwide

The global economic crisis has a devastating effect for the world’s undernourished. The sharp spike in hunger triggered by the global economic crisis has hit the poorest people in developing countries hardest, revealing a fragile world food system in urgent need of reform, according to a report released today by the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP).

This is an historic level for hunger worldwide. Nearly all the world’s hungry live in developing countries. In Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 642 million people are suffering from chronic hunger; in Sub-Saharan Africa 265 million; in Latin America and the Caribbean 53 million; in the Near East and North Africa 42 million; and in developed countries 15 million.

Even before the recent crisis, the number of hungry people in the world had been increasing slowly but steadily for the past decade. Good progress were made in the 1980’s and early 1990’s in reducing chronic hunger. But between 1995 and 2006, as development assistance devoted to agriculture declined sharply, the number of hungry people increased in all regions except Latin America.

The rise in the number of hungry people during both periods of low prices and economic prosperity, and the very sharp rise in period of price spikes and economic downturns shows the weakness of the global food security system.

“World leaders have reacted forcefully to the financial and economic crisis and succeeded in mobilizing billion of dollars in a short time period. The same strong action is needed now to combat hunger and poverty. The rising number of hungry people in intolerable. We have the economic and technical means to make hunger disappear, what is missing is a stronger political will to eradicate hunger forever,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf.

The new Nobel Peace prize laureate should meditate on the wise words of Mr. Diouf  next time he is ready to commit billions of dollars on warfare and, by doing so, willing  to waste  our  precious resources that could be used to solve such problems as world hunger.

It is unacceptable in the 21st Century that almost one in six of the world’s population is now going hungry. Curiously, on the same day of the FAO’s report release, the Dow Jones index passed the bar of 10,000. It does indicate a rebound from  Wall Street and the global financial market. However, it is a jobless recovery even in the United States. Main Street America is still struggling to make ends meet while the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America are literally starving.

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