How to make hunger and malnutrition history ?

Photo credit: Food Tank

We can win the war against hunger, provided we strengthen access to food, sustainability becomes our watchword, and we adequately address the challenge of climate change.

Mapping the Way to Zero Hunger

This is a guest article written by José Graziano da Silva (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization), Kanayo F. Nwanze (International Fund for Agricultural Development), and Ertharin Cousin (World Food Programme).

The number of undernourished people in the world has been brought downby over two hundred million since 1990 mainly thanks to increased political commitments to act against hunger. This has happened even as the planet’s population grew by two billion – and despite higher cereal prices starting almost a decade ago and the more recent global economic slowdown. This tells us that a world without hunger is not a dream, but something we can make real.

This year marks the endpoint of the efforts associated with reaching the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) hunger target, which aimed at halving the proportion of hungry people in developing countries. A majority of the countries monitored – 72 out of 129 –have achieved the MDG hunger target and developing regions as a whole missed it by a small margin. Today, just under 13 percent of the developing world’s population is undernourished, down from 23.3 percent in 1990.

Still, hunger remains a grim reality for almost 795 million people, or one out of nine persons worldwide, according to our latest global assessment. So we need to aim higher –to make hunger history.

Read the full article: Food Tank