World hunger report: 842 million starve in the midst of plenty

[Karmadillo]

This will be a major issue in the 2004 elections. Honest. Really. Nonstop discussion. Day after day after day. We'll be utterly sick of it by November, 2004. You watch.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/hung-d19.shtml

World hunger is increasing, with an estimated 842 million people going to bed hungry every night. Most people suffering from hunger live in Africa and Latin America, but 34 million are in the former Soviet Union and 10 million live in the rich industrialised countries.

This startling evidence of the growing division between rich and poor on a world scale appears in a recent report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Halving hunger was one of the UN Millennium Development Goals announced in 1992. The number of people experiencing hunger was supposed to be halved by 2015. Rather than decreasing as the FAO anticipated, the number of hungry people has increased by 4.5 million a year between 1995 and 1997 and from 1999 to 2001. Improved nutrition in some countries is being more than offset by a decline in others.

Amongst the group of countries that suffered a reversal of falling numbers of malnourished were some with large populations such as Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. The report states, “With reversals in many large countries and progress slowing in others, the pattern of change in the developing countries as a whole shifted from a declining to a rising trend. Between 1995-1997 and 1999-2001, the number of hungry people in the developing countries increased by 18 million wiping out almost half the decrease of 37 million achieved during the previous five years. Unless significant gains are made in large countries where progress has stalled, it will be difficult to reverse this negative trend.”

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[prisonerseven]

1. Do donations to WSWS go to help the hungry?

Any idea what percentage that wsws takes in from donations gets sent to starving people around the world?

[Karmadillo]

2. Don't know. You can email them from

link at bottom of their web page. I doubt they get much in the way of donations, so I doubt as an organization they give all that much.

If you're interested in helping those facing starvation, you can contribute to UNICEF and Oxfam. Highly reputable and they do a huge amount of good.

On Edit: Typo

[Valarauko]

3. According to other groups, world hunger is decreasing.

Depends who's counting it seems.

[Karmadillo]

4. Do you know which organizations have issued

such findings recently? Just curious. This kind of survey is obviously not an easy one to conduct and I'd like to see the conclusions others have reached. Thanks.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Full FAO report and summary available here

http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/j0083e/j0083e00.htm