The Food and Agricultural Organization released a report in November finding that the total number of people who are undernourished is now increasing by about 5 million a year. The number of people malnourished is now about 850 million according to the FAO report.
The number of undernourished people continues to decline in Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, but is increasing in the Middle East and Africa. In those regions, according to the FAO, people still go hungry largely due to political reason,
Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will. The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in rural areas of the developing world, far from the levers of political power and beyond the range of vision of the media and the public in the developed countries.
The report also noted that AIDS and limited irrigation in the developing world also makes it difficult for countries to effectively fight hunger.
Sources:
World growing hungrier, says UN. The BBC, November 25, 2003.
The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003. Food and Agricultural Organization, 2003.