Global economic and financial crisis (2007-2008) coupled with food and fuel crises (2006-2008) has pushed the number of undernourished in the world to 1.02 billion during 2009, This has happened despite international food commodity prices declining from their earlier peaks, finds a newly released report of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, www.fao.org) titled: The State of Food insecurity in the World Report 2009: Economic Crises-Impacts and Lessons Learnt....

Faced with rising world hunger and “unacceptable” poverty, members of the Food and Agriculture Organisation Committee on World Food Security (CFS) have agreed on a wide-ranging reform, the FAO announced on Tuesday. The reform aims at making the CFS an “inclusive” international and intergovernmental platform dealing with food security and nutrition, and its being a central component in the evolving global partnership for agriculture, food security and nutrition. In addition...

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that worldwide progress in reducing hunger remains slow. The 2009 global GHI has fallen by only one quarter from the 1990 GHI. Southeast Asia, the Near East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean have reduced hunger significantly since 1990, but the GHI remains distressingly high in South Asia, which has made progress since 1990, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, where progress has...

The economic turmoil sweeping the globe has lead to a sharp spike in hunger affecting the world’s poorest, uncovering a fragile global food system requiring urgent reform, according to a report issued today by two United Nations agencies. The combination of the food and economic crises have pushed more people into hunger, with the number of hungry expected to top 1 billion this year, according to the Food and Agriculture...

We normally assume that malnutrition is a disease of the poorer states, which the richer states are in the process of curing. It now transpires that malnutrition among women and child undernourishment, two essential markers of human development, are rampant in richer states as well. States with high per capita incomes such as Gujarat and Haryana have performed poorly in transforming the growth they have experienced into the well-being of...