Monday, October 30, 2006

UN: No progress in halving world hunger

A decade after political leaders pledged to halve the world's population of hungry people, no progress has been made a United Nations report said Monday.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said there are 854 million underfed people in the world.

Airport employees load aid supplies at Cointrin airport in Geneva, August 8, 2006. Ten years after political leaders pledged to halve the number of underfed people in the world, no progress has been made and the number of hungry people is rising again, a U.N. report said on Monday. (Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
Airport workers load aid supplies at Cointrin airport in Geneva, August 8, 2006. Denis Balibouse/Reuters photo from Yahoo News.

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said that was only a statiscally insingnficant decrease in the number of hungry people, and that the latest trends may even indicate that the number is beginning to rise again.

"Far from decreasing, the number of hungry people in the world is currently increasing - at the rate of 4 million a year," he said.

Despite the setbacks FAO pledged to meet the goal of halving hunger by 2015 through improved agriculture in developing countries.
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