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Food security and the coming millenium
Fighting hunger and malnutrition is the theme of World Food Day 1996, celebrated annually to mark the founding of FAO in 1945. And this year, it comes less than four weeks before governments meet at FAO headquarters in Rome at the World Food Summit to renew their pledges to achieving global food security.
Both events are a powerful reminder of a global search for solutions to the stubborn problems of hunger and poverty. About 840 million people worldwide suffer from chronic undernourishment. Each year, nearly 11 million children under the age of 5 die as a direct or indirect result of hunger and malnutrition.
Most of these people live in more than 80 nations, classified as low-income food-deficit countries (LIFDCs), many of which cannot produce enough food to feed their populations and lack the financial resources to import the extra supplies they need. Almost half of these LIFDCs are in Africa. Most of the rest are in Asia and Latin America, but some Eastern European states making the transition from centrally planned to market economies are also in this bracket.
By far the greatest numbers of chronically undernourished people, 512 million of them, are found in South and Southeast Asia. The highest proportion, however, is in Africa, south of the Sahara, where 43 percent of the population are chronically undernourished compared to 20 percent overall in developing countries.
The forthcoming Summit will adopt a Declaration and Global Plan of Action aimed at achieving universal food security -- when all people at all times have access to enough nutritionally adequate and safe food for an active and health life. But what are the immediate prospects for food security in different regions of the world? And how do individual countries and their people fare?