Ten years after the World Food Summit, held in Rome in 1996, whose main objective was to halve the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015, we have to admit that instead of decreasing, this number has today risen in most developing countries.
According to Jacques Diouf, director general of the United Nations Organization for food and agriculture (FAO), “far from decreasing, the number of hungry people in the world is currently increasing at the rate of 4 million a year”. There are therefore, in 2006, 820 million human beings who are suffering from malnutrition in DCs, which is an insignificant reduction (-1%) compared to the reference period in 1990.
We are therefore a long way from honouring the commitment that was made at the World Food Summit, which would mean that the number of people suffering from malnutrition must decrease by 31 million per year until 2015!
However, since 1996, we notice a reduction in the proportion of people in DCs who are victims of hunger: then one person out of five was undernourished, today 17% of the population in DCs is undernourished. But these trends mask considerable disparities between regions. Regions in Asia-Pacific and Latin America have experienced a global decrease in both the number and the proportion of undernourished people. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of undernourished people has been constantly increasing since 1996 (+25%).
It is not impossible to believe that the objectives of the World Food Summit could still be reached, “if we take concrete and concerted measures”, says the FAO, which recommends an approach aimed first and foremost at agricultural and rural development. This vision of a strategic agriculture to reach the major objectives of this century is shared by WOAgri, which considers, like the FAO, that this objective can only be reached if there is real political will and the implementation of real governance on a world scale.
Source : FAO |