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Why the world is going backwards on the UN goal to halve hunger and what can be done

HungerFREE scorecard 2010

Executive Summary

Going Backwards: The billion hungry

This September, leaders are gathering in New York to assess progress on the UN's Millennium Development Goals for halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. On hunger, the MDGs commit leaders to reducing by half the proportion of people who are undernourished and the proportion of children who are underweight. These targets are, quite literally, a matter of life and death for the one billion people who struggle on a daily basis to avoid starvation.

With only five years to go, how is the world doing? The bitter truth is that the world is going backwards on hunger. If massive gains in China are excluded from the picture, then global hunger has risen back to exactly the same level in 2009 as it was in 1990. This means that 500 million more people are chronically malnourished1than if the UN goal had been achieved.

The two regions which are home to the largest numbers of hungry people, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, have lost the most ground in the wake of the food and financial crises. In South Asia, the prevalence of hunger surpassed the MDG 1990 baseline levels last year, gripping more than one in five of the region's people. Nearly half of South Asian children remain malnourished, a situation little changed from 1990 - indefensible considering the region's per capita income has tripled in the same period.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, alarmingly, just under a third of the total population was chronically hungry by 2009 - up by two percentage points, from 30 percent in 2006. Worst of all, food security is predicted to deteriorate further in Africa, to the point that nearly 50 percent of Africans could be going without enough food by 2020.

However, the news is not all bad. Governments are beginning to re-invest in agriculture, albeit from a very low base. Seven countries improved their score on budgetary allocations to agriculture between last year and this year. The food and financial crises have also spurred some improvements to social assistance programmes, which often make the difference between vulnerability and destitution when times get tough. Although such programmes are still tiny in most developing countries, twelve countries (Burundi, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Guatemala and Haiti) improved their score this year for social safety net coverage, while only a handful went down.