World Has Enough Food, But Millions Still Face Chronic Hunger -FAO

BANGKOK, May 29 (Bernama) -- The world produces enough food to feed everyone in the world today but yet there are millions who go hungry everyday because they do not have enough to eat. In fact, there are still 490 million people in Asia and the Pacific alone who suffer from chronic hunger – more than any other region of the world, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced today in its Regional Overview of Food Insecurity in Asia and the Pacific: Towards a Food Secure Asia and the Pacific. While the world presently produces enough food for all, the challenge of making sure everyone gets enough to eat will become even greater as the world population is expected to grow to more than nine billion people by 2050 – with rural to urban migration continuing apace, said Hiroyuki Konuma, FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative. Other challenges such as obesity, especially in Pacific Islands, and the hidden hunger of poor nutrition must be addressed, he said on Thursday. While there are many people in the Asia-Pacific region still suffering from hunger, the region has achieved the Millennium Development Goals (MDG-1c) by reducing the proportion of people suffering from hunger by half by 2015. "This is an historic achievement, a great milestone of which the Asia-Pacific region should be proud," said Konuma at a press conference today. "Looking at the region as a whole, in the MDG base year of 1990, around 24 per cent of the population was undernourished. Today, that percentage has been cut in half to 12 per cent and thus has met the MDG hunger goal." Some of the greatest reductions in the proportion of those hungry during that 25-year period were seen in China (60.9 per cent), Thailand (78.7 per cent), Vietnam (75.8 per cent) and Indonesia (61.6 per cent). While the region as a whole has achieved the MDG proportional hunger target, the achievements are uneven at sub-regional levels. "Unfortunately, South Asia has not managed to achieve the same level of success as East Asia and Southeast Asia – the two sub-regions that achieved the greatest proportional drop in undernourished," Konuma said. "And while overall the Asia-Pacific region achieved the largest reduction in the absolute number of undernourished people in the world – some 236 million people – this was not sufficient to meet the additional target set by the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) to reduce the absolute numbers by half." "With 12 per cent of our population still undernourished, we must turn our full attention to them," he said. --BERNAMA