The world produces enough food to feed everyone. So why are so many people hungry? The simple answer is that they can’t afford to pay for food. More than 1 billion people subsist on less than $1 a day.

OK, so that means that if we reduce poverty, then hunger will eventually disappear, right?

Yes, but that’s a tall order. To reduce poverty, rural development policies will have to create opportunities for education and employment for the rural poor. This will be difficult but not impossible.

Trapped!

But there’s another problem, and it’s a big one. Even we succeed in providing more opportunities for jobs and education in rural communities, people who have suffered from hunger since birth may not be able to take advantage of them.

It’s important to understand how hunger and malnutrition undermine a person’s health. Children of undernourished mothers are often small and weak. Because hunger affects the immune system, undernourished children often suffer from severe infections or become sick with diseases like malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea or measles. Because they do not get enough vitamins and minerals in their diet, children’s physical and mental development can be slowed and they can have difficulty concentrating and studying when they reach school age.

Find out more about hunger.

So you see, poor and hungry families are in a very difficult situation. They are hungry because they are poor and they remain poor because they are hungry. They’re caught in a hunger/poverty trap.

This is why the first UN Millennium Development Goal is to reduce both hunger and extreme poverty by half by 2015 and why FAO has always advocated strongly for national and international development policies that give equal weight to eliminating poverty and hunger.

Find out more about the UN Millennium Development Goals.