FOOD security is the sine qua non of human existence. Without food nothing happens, no economic endeavour, no science or engineering, no music or literature, not even, in a year of famine, procreation.
Since 1974, the year of the Henry Kissinger-sponsored World Food Conference, called at a time of catastrophic food shortages, there has been immense progress on the journey towards providing food for all, even though the world remains a long way from fulfiling the great ambition of the conference’s final declaration that “within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition.”
Hundreds of millions of people who were suffering from malnutrition in the 1970s are now eating two square meals a day despite the rapid onward march of population growth. Yet rightly last week the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation signaled a major alert: for the first time in many years, it said, the numbers of hungry are beginning to rise again. In some countries — in Africa in particular but also most worryingly in India, a country which hitherto has made phenomenal progress in feeding its people — the numbers of hungry are going up. Even in China where the numbers keep falling the rate of improvement has slowed.
The FAO latest estimate is that there are around 798 million malnourished people in the world. In the most recent four years for which figures are available (1997 to 2001) the number of hungry has increased by 19 million, wiping out almost half of the decrease of 37 million achieved in the five years previous to that.
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