Ahead of the first United Nations
environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972, a group of scientists prepared
The Limits to Growth report for the
Club of Rome. It showed planet Earth’s finite natural resources cannot support ever-growing human consumption.
At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the
number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the
proportion of the hungry.
Eight decades ago, during the Great Depression, newly elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal consisting of a number of mutually supporting initiatives of which the most prominent were:
The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades.