UN hunger reduction report: India trumps China, leads world's hunger list at 195 million

A report compiled by the United Nations said that the number of hungry people worldwide has reduced from one billion 25 years ago to about 795 million today. But in absolute terms, it means despite a surge in global population, one person out of every nine person is still underfed. Speaking to Reuters, Josefina Stubbs, director of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said that about three-quarters of those who don’t have enough food are small farmers and urged more international support for rural producers. However, the report spells bad news for India. Home to a quarter of the world’s underfed, India could not meet the target set by the the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. According to this report in Livemint , India has failed to cut the proportion of undernourished by 2015. India missed two targets – the millennium development goal and the goal set by the World Food Summit in 1996. [caption id=“attachment_2266924” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “] Reuters image.[/caption] India accounts for an estimated 194.6 million undernourished people in any single country, the report noted. Pointing out that the highest burden of hunger in “absolute terms” is to be found in Southern Asia, the report noted  that the estimates for 2014–16 suggest that about 281 million people are undernourished in the region, marking only a slight reduction from the number in 1990–92. The report released by the United Nation’s Food & Agriculture Organization called, the State of Food Insecurity in the World, says, “The evolution of hunger trends in India, in particular, has a significant influence on results for the region. Higher world food prices, observed since the late 2000s, have not been entirely transmitted into domestic prices, especially in large countries such as India. In this country, the extended food distribution programme also contributed to this positive outcome. Higher economic growth has not been fully translated into higher food consumption, let alone better diets overall, suggesting that the poor and hungry may have failed to benefit much from overall growth.” The UN report further added that as the Asian and Southeast Asian countries constitute a large share of the region’s population, they account for the low overall performance. However, India still has the second-highest estimated number of undernourished people in the world. While the proportion of undernourished in India’s population fell from 23.7% in 1990-92 to 15.2% in 2014-16 (a decline of 36%) Nepal and Bangladesh reported improved reductions at 65.6% and 49.9%, respectively. “A notable exception in terms of performance is Bangladesh, which has made faster progress and has already reached the MDG hunger target, thanks also to the comprehensive National Food Policy framework adopted in the mid-2000s. Nepal, also, has not only reached the MDG 1c hunger target, but has almost reached the 5 percent threshold. One more country in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has already brought the PoU below 5 percent, and has thus reached the MDG target,” the UN report noted. China, on the other hand, has dominated the fight against global hunger and trumped India, accounting for about two thirds of the reduction in hungry people in developing regions in the past 25 years. Among major regions in the world, eastern and Southeast Asia reduced hunger by the most, the report further noted. According to the UN report, if one excludes China and India from the aggregate of the developing regions, “the reduction in undernourishment follows a more stable, continuous downward trend. China and India alone account for 81 percent of the total reduction of the number of undernourished people in the developing regions between 1990–92 and 2014–16, and China alone accounts for almost two-thirds.” Despite the finding that nearly 800 million people in the world remain hungry, the report described the progress made as a significant achievement. Despite a growing population, the percentage of the world’s people who don’t have enough to eat has dropped to 13 percent compared to 23 percent in 1990, the report said. “Economic growth alone does not solve the problem of hunger,” said Jose Graziano da Silva, Director General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). “We need specific policies to address the situation.” Quoting Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the Supreme Court Commissioners in the Right to Food case, Livemint report said, “The situation in India is likely to worsen due to severe cutbacks in the Union budget on key programmes on child nutrition and mid-day meal scheme.”