By IPS Correspondents
BERLIN, Oct 16 2000 (IPS)

Four years after the World Food Summit, 792 million people in 98 developing countries are not getting enough food to lead normal, healthy and active lives, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

Even in the western industrialised states and the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union the number of undernourished remains the same: 34 million children, women and men.

“In a world of unprecedented wealth, these levels of need are disgraceful,” says FAO director general Jacques Diouf introducing ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World’ (SOFI 2000).

The report was released Monday simultaneously in Berlin, Dublin, London, Rome, Washington, Nairobi and Bangkok.

The report was created to track progress towards ending a profound obstacle to human rights, quality of life and dignity.

It was spurred by the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, where leaders of 186 countries pledged to reduce by half the number of hungry people in the world by 2015.

SOFI 2000 warns that unless extra efforts are undertaken to alleviate hunger, the goal of reducing the number of undernourished to 400 million by 2015 will not be achieved before the year 2030 – 15 years later than planned.

However, “hungry people cannot wait another 15 years.”

In the present report, FAO introduces a new tool for measuring the severity of want: the depth of hunger.

Measurements of the depth of hunger demonstrate that under- nourishment is far more debilitating in some places than in others.

In the industrialised countries, hungry people lack 130 kilocalories per day on average, while in five of the poorest countries, the daily food deficit is more than three times that, 450 kilocalories.

Most of the countries with the most extreme depth of hunger – more than 300 kilocalories per person per day – are located in Africa.

Others are found in Afghanistan, Haiti, Bangladesh, North Korea and Mongolia.

Many of these countries face extraordinary obstacles such as conflict or recurrent natural disasters.

“To realise the World Food Summit target, we have to achieve a reduction of at least 20 million every year between now and 2015,” says Diouf.

The actual rate of decline – about eight million a year since the early 1990s – is, therefore, “woefully inadequate,” adds the FAO director general.

“Women are often more vulnerable than men to malnutrition because of their different physiological requirements,” says the report.

“In most cases, a woman requires a higher intake of vitamins and minerals in proportion to total dietary energy intake than a man. When women are pregnant or lactating, their foods need to be even richer in energy and nutrients.”

As last year’s report, SOFI 2000 highlights short-term and long- term measures that together offer possible solutions to hunger.

Summing up Diouf says, “We must address conflict, the cause of the deepest hunger in most of the poorest countries of the world.

“Conflict resolution and peace keeping activities must be seen as vital tools in fighting hunger. Once peace is achieved, war- shattered economies must be rebuilt.”

The report also pleads for making the investment needed to build foundations for sustainable, longer-term economic growth and poverty reduction.

A case in point is Thailand where under-nourishment was greatly reduced over 15 years as a result of economic growth and specific policies to reduce poverty and improve nutrition values.

As a result, the percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32.6 percent in 998 to 11.4 percent in 1996 and severe malnutrition amongst young children was eliminated.

A section of the report is dedicated to fisher folks in Benin as an example of vulnerable group profiling, which is a means of identifying who in a given population is hungry, why and, by implication, what can be done about it.

“Determining the vulnerable groups in a country is a tool to help decision-makers direct interventions to people most vulnerable to food insecurity,” the FAO report points out.

SOFI 2000 also pleads for releasing resources for development in many heavily indebted poor countries.

“Debt relief can spur progress towards reducing hunger, provided the resources freed up are used, not only to feed the hungry now, but also to put countries and communities on to a longer-term path of sustainable development by investing in food security.”

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