UN: Nearly 1 Billion Live with Hunger

clipped from www.un.org With 40 million people being pushed into hunger this year mostly due to soaring food prices, the number of undernourished people worldwide is approaching the 1 billion mark, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced today. The total number of hungry people has risen to 963 million this year, up from 923 million last year, and FAO cautioned in the latest edition of its global hunger report that this number could rise further as a result of the ongoing financial and economic crisis. “For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream,” said Hafez Ghanem, FAO Assistant-Director General. “The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices, remain a dire reality.”

The lion's share of the problem is food prices. While prices have dropped recently, the report tells us "they still remain high compared to previous years."

"FAO’s Food Price Index is still nearly 30 per cent higher as of October 2008 than it was two years before," according to the UN. "Meanwhile, the prices of seeds, fertilizers and other inputs have more than doubled since 2006, leaving poor farmers unable to produce food."

Over two-thirds of the world's hungry live in just seven nations: India, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.