Of which the overwhelming majority (98%, 852 million) live in developing countries. These are the figures presented by FAO in its latest report "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012." Despite a reduction in the number of hungry people in Latin America and Asia, in Africa, in the last four years, over 20 million people were thrown into a situation of hunger, leading to the fact that one in eight people on the planet suffers from malnutrition.
During the presentation of the study, José Graziano da Silva, general director of FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) said that some countries present good results in the fight against hunger and the implementation of coordinated policies will surely enable some regions of the world to still achieve the targets set in the Millennium Development Goals.
The report highlights the good results of some countries in the fight against hunger. For example, in Latin America, Peru and Nicaragua (two countries where Oikos develops Food Security projects) managed to reduce the problem by 54% and 49%, respectively. Overall, the region that has had more success in eliminating hunger was Asia, where over the past 10 years, 200 million people have escaped the threat of food insecurity (China alone is responsible for removing 100 million people from malnutrition).
Although Africa continues to be a problem, Graziano da Silva said that while some countries stagnated or presented negative results, others have very interesting advances. "Unfortunately, many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and in the Horn of Africa have seen an increase in the number of hungry people, an area where we have faced all kinds of problems such as droughts, floods, conflicts and is going in the opposite direction of the general trend in reducing hunger. Yet even in Africa we have good news: Ghana, for example, reduced hunger by 87%, Mali, before the conflict, had a reduction of 44% and 35% in Cameroon and this shows that even in adverse situations, coordinated policies to promote agricultural development, especially those that privilege small farmers, as was done in Ghana, give immediate results".
FAO also recalled that despite the current global economic crisis (which eliminated some of the gains in the fight against hunger) it is unacceptable that in the world there are still 100 million underweight children under five years of age due to shortages food and that the international community must do more to reverse the situation of hunger in the world.