The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN came out with new numbers late last week on the state of global food insecurity, and the bottom-line message is there are now more than a billion chronically hungry people in the world. To be exact, the number is 1.02 billion, or roughly one of every six people on the planet.
Every year FAO publishes a report on the state of food insecurity, and this year's was released on the eve of World Food Day, October 16. It seems apt given the historic crossing of the threshold. This is the first time the number of hungry in the world has crossed over a billion, and while in recent decades the percentages of chronically hungry people have been decreasing (in the1960s, one out of every three people was hungry), the trends over the last 15 years or so suggests progress has become much tougher to come by.
The financial crisis and the severity of the global recession have had a profound effect on the dramatic rise in hunger from 2008 to 2009. If things seem rough here at home, where Americans spend between 5-15 percent of their income on food, the situation is downright grim in the developing world, where poor people spend 70 percent of their income on food in good times.
Regionally, the areas where hunger is most pervasive are Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Together, these two regions account for more than 80 percent of the billion people that are hungry.
The news we are fed regularly about China’s stunning progress diverts attention from the large numbers of people elsewhere in Asia, including parts of China itself, who aren’t becoming ay less hungry.
The nations hit the hardest are the ones that rely on food imports. Agricultural yields need to increase in the these places. This only reinforces Bread for the World’s persistent call that greater amounts of foreign assistance be directed to agriculture programs. We’ve been saying this for a long time, and while it’s clear this message has gotten through (somewhat) to the policymakers who control how foreign assistance is spent, the fact that more than a billion people are now hungry is like a kick in the gut to tell us how urgent the situation has gotten.
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