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A
severely malnourished North Korean boy, 17-month-old
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ROME, October 15 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Six million children under five
die of starvation every year while progress in the world fight against
hunger has virtually ground to a halt, the UN food agency said
Tuesday, October 15, on the eve of World Food Day.
Jacques Diouf,
head of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said
member countries fell far short in their World Food Summit commitment
to halve the number of the world's hungry by 2015, reported Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
"The good
news has been that the number of undernourished people in the
developing world continues to decline. The bad news has been that the
decline has been too slow, that our progress has been falling far
short of the pace needed."
The current
decline in the number of hungry is 2.5 million a year over the past
eight years, said Diouf in a foreword to the report.
Latest estimates
put the number of undernourished people in the world at 840 million,
almost 800 million of them in developing countries.
"If we
continue at the current rate, we will reach the World Food Summit goal
100 years late, closer to the year 2050 than to 2015. Clearly, that is
simply unacceptable," said Diouf.
Diouf said it was
"simply imperative" to set a new target of annual decline at
24 million each year from now until 2015, despite it being ten times
the pace achieved over the past eight years.
The world was
paying a high price for inaction over hunger, he said, citing the
example of six million children under the age of five who die as a
result of hunger and malnutrition each year.
"That is
roughly equivalent to the entire population of children under five in
Japan, or in France and Italy combined."
On Thursday,
October 10, South Africa volunteered to help some 800,000 people in
the small mountainous kingdom of Lesotho, who faced severe food
shortages.
Mohlabi Tsekoa
told reporters in Pretoria: "Scores of our people need urgent
assistance and South Africa has volunteered to help."
"South
Africa, at a recent Southern African Development Community (SADC)
summit in Angola, made a voluntary offer to help countries in the
region afflicted by famine and Lesotho was one of them," he
added.
And on Monday,
October 7, Nicaraguan authorities said that at least 21 people,
including 11 children, died of malnutrition in the north of the
country during the first nine months of 2002.
"The figure
was given based on officially reported cases, but it is probable that
the number of deaths is even higher," Nicaraguan official in
charge of the Agency for Infancy and Adolescents, Judge Emilio Lopez
said.
Several groups
have in recent weeks underlined the problem of hunger and malnutrition
in Nicaragua, saying it was the direct consequence of low coffee
prices this year, with the loss of 30,000 jobs in the sector in the
north of the country.
Hundreds of
jobless families with no food have set up shantytowns along the
Panamerican Highway, especially in the Matagalpa province, some 130
kilometers north of Managua, according to Lopez.
At the World Food
Summit in Rome last June, Diouf warned the clock was ticking in member
countries' race against the 2015 deadline to half the number of the
world's hungry.
"The
currency most urgently needed is not dollars but commitment."
"We do not
have the excuse that we cannot grow enough or that we do not know
enough about how to eliminate hunger. What remains to be proven is
that we care enough," said Diouf, who is from Senegal.
According to the
FAO report, "The State of Food Insecurity in the World
2002", the chief cause of hunger in a world of abundance
continues to be poverty. Among the other main causes are drought,
floods, armed conflicts and political, social and economic upheavals.
"Frequently,
these shocks strike countries already suffering from endemic poverty
and struggling to recover from earlier natural and human-caused
disasters."
Currently, FAO
says 32 countries face "exceptional food emergencies", with
an estimated 67 million people requiring emergency food aid as a
result.
Diouf restated
the case for a FAO plan presented in June to kick-start an accelerated
campaign against hunger that would help the World Food Summit reach
its 2015 target.
It said an
investment of 24 billion dollars (euros) a year, shared equally be
developed and developing nations, would sharply lower the number of
hungry and yield 120 billion dollars a year in benefits.
On Wednesday, Diouf will launch World
Food Day 2002 in Rome with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.
