Key documents: Food, agriculture and food security FAO paper for World Food Summit		Hunger spans three milleniums Hunger has afflicted people throughout history. The first written record of famine was in Egypt in the year 3500 BC. War, drought, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other human-made and natural disasters have all led to famine. But poverty is a main cause of the hunger that afflicts many millions of people. When compounded by other factors, its effects can be dramatic. In the 1943 Bengal famine some 2 to 3 million people died - not because food was in short supply but because the price of food was beyond the reach of the poor. The causes of hunger are still with us, but this century has seen substantial progress toward producing more food that reaches many more people. The global per caput availability of food has increased despite unprecedented population growth. While the world's population grew by more than 1 600 million people over the past two decades, the average daily energy supply (DES) rose from 2 440 Calories in 1969-1972 to 2 720 Calories in 1990-92. The most dramatic progress has been in East and Southeast Asia where 41 percent of the population did not have sufficient food 25 years ago. By 1992, the region's population had increased by more than 500 million, but the undernourished made up 16 percent of the total. During the same period, the proportion of the undernourished dropped from 18 percent to 15 percent in Latin America and from 25 percent to 12 percent in North Africa and the Near East. Food availability has improved in the rest of Africa too, but the per caput intake is still little more than 2 040 Calories a day, well below the global average of 2 720 Calories.