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Food security and the challenge of the MDGs: the road Ahead.

Article Excerpt
In their solemn Millennium Declaration of 2000, world leaders committed themselves to spare no effort to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the world's people who suffer from poverty and hunger. Just seven years remain for us to meet that momentous challenge. Having passed the halfway mark in the race against hunger, the most important lesson we have learned is that it can still be won; however, a much greater and more sustained effort will be required of us.

Progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals' (MDGs) first and most important objective--eradicate poverty and hunger--has been uneven. On the one hand, according to the World Bank, at the global level the proportion of people living in extreme poverty fell from 28 per cent in 1990 to 20 per cent in 2003. On the other, for the proportion of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition in developing countries, where hunger is concentrated, only a 3-per-cent drop, from 20 to 17 per cent, was registered.

Measured in terms of the number of undernourished people, rather than of the prevalence of hunger in the total population, achieving the challenge appears even more daunting. Despite rapid economic growth in China and India, the Asia and Pacific region is still home to the greatest number of poor and hungry people in the world. The prevalence of undernourishment in the region is second only to that of Africa....

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