Year of the hungry: 1,000,000,000 afflicted

[babylonsister]

Year of the hungry: 1,000,000,000 afflicted

Despite the West's pledge to halve world hunger, the number of people who are short of food will soon reach a shocking landmark

By Geoffrey Lean
Sunday, 28 December 2008

Getty Images

Food aid is expected to begin drying up next month


One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history, as the international financial crisis deepens, the United Nations has told The Independent on Sunday.

The shocking landmark will be passed – despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row – because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced.

Decades of progress in reducing hunger are being abruptly reversed, dealing a devastating blow to a pledge by world leaders eight years ago to cut it in half by 2015.

Rich countries have failed to provide promised money to boost agriculture in the Third World; the financial crisis is starving developing countries of credit and driving their people into greater poverty, and food aid to the starving is expected to begin drying up next month.

Development charities recently called on US president-elect Barack Obama to put the escalating food crisis "front and centre" of his priorities.

Some 963 million people are now undernourished worldwide, according to the most recent survey of the crisis by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and the UN body expects the situation to worsen with the recession. "The number will rise steadily next year," an FAO spokesman told the IoS last week. "We are looking at a billion people. That is clear." The FAO fears the tally will go on increasing for years to come.

This directly contradicts an undertaking by the world's leaders at a special summit in September 2000 to "reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger" from 1990 levels by 2015, as part of an ambitious set of Millennium Development Goals.

more...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/year-of-the-hungry-1000000000-afflicted-1213843.html

[opihimoimoi]

1. Unless we start a program to address Over Population...we are screwed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Its inevitiable....if we continue to expand our numbers...we will experience a hugh dieback....much suffering, misery, death

We should be looking for ways to stop the increase and for ways to stabilize or even reduce our populations...