One of the most underreported stories of the last decade is about good news: we’re winning the struggle against chronic hunger around the globe.
A new U.N. report estimates that the number of chronically undernourished people in the world has decreased by more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. Those figures are even more remarkable when we consider the global population has increased by almost 2 billion since 1990.
According to the report, since 1990-92, 63 countries have reached the hunger target of halving the proportion of undernourished people and 25 countries have achieved the goal of halving the number of undernourished people. Of the 63 developing countries, 11 already had undernourishment levels below 5 percent (the methodological limit that can assure significance of the results different from zero) in 1990-1992 and have been able to keep it in that interval, and are therefore not the prime focus of the 2014 report.
In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries. There has likely never been a time in modern human history when such a large percentage of the population has been freed from chronic hunger.
Unfortunately, about 805 million people — mostly in Africa and South-Eastern Asia still remain without adequate food resources, due largely to conflicts and natural disasters. But we’re making remarkable progress. In fact, as Steve Davies of LearnLiberty explains, in the near future we may be able to eradicate extreme poverty and global hunger altogether.
