UN revises figure for world hungry to 870 million, blames data flaws
Source: Agencies |
October 10, 2012, Wednesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
THE United Nations now says its 2009 headline-grabbing announcement that 1 billion people in the world were hungry was off-target and that the number is actually more like 870 million.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization blamed flawed methodology and poor data for the bum projection, and said it now uses a much more accurate set of parameters and statistics to calculate its annual estimate of the world's hungry.
FAO issued its 2012 state of food insecurity report yesterday, and its core point was to set the record straight about the number of the world's undernourished people, applying the more accurate data retroactively back to 1990.
And the good news, FAO said, is that the number of hungry people has actually been falling steadily - rather than rising - over the past two decades, although progress has slowed since the 2007-2008 food crises and the global economic woes.
FAO said if the right action is taken now to boost economic growth and invest in agriculture, particularly in poor countries, the UN goal of reducing by one-half the number of the world's hungry people by 2015 is very much within reach.
To be sure, 870 million hungry people is still far too many hungry people, said the heads of the three UN food agencies in a forward to the report.
"In today's world of unprecedented technical and economic opportunities, we find it entirely unacceptable that more than 100 million children under the age of five are underweight, and are therefore unable to realize their full socioeconomic and human potential," they wrote.
FAO made headlines in 2009 when it said that 1 billion people - one-sixth of the world's population - were undernourished. A high-level summit was called at FAO headquarters in Rome. The UN chief went on a daylong hunger strike to show solidarity with the 1 billion. The Group of Eight devoted much of its summit that year to pledging US$20 billion for seeds, fertilizers and tools to help poor nations feed themselves.
It turns out, though, that the projections were wrong. They were calculated using figures from non-UN sources that were fed into the UN's number-crunching model, because FAO was under pressure from governments to quickly come up with an estimate of how many people might go hungry from the dual crises of high food prices and the global downturn, said Kostas Stamoulis, director of FAO's agricultural development economics division.
"There was considerable fear that combination of lower incomes and higher prices was going to cause significant undernourishment," Jomo Kwame Sundaram, FAO's assistant director-general for economic and social development, said.
But now, "no one really knows for sure if at any particular period whether that 1 billion figure was actually reached or not." The goal is to assess chronic hunger, rather than spikes due to temporary food shortages and price hikes, he added.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization blamed flawed methodology and poor data for the bum projection, and said it now uses a much more accurate set of parameters and statistics to calculate its annual estimate of the world's hungry.
FAO issued its 2012 state of food insecurity report yesterday, and its core point was to set the record straight about the number of the world's undernourished people, applying the more accurate data retroactively back to 1990.
And the good news, FAO said, is that the number of hungry people has actually been falling steadily - rather than rising - over the past two decades, although progress has slowed since the 2007-2008 food crises and the global economic woes.
FAO said if the right action is taken now to boost economic growth and invest in agriculture, particularly in poor countries, the UN goal of reducing by one-half the number of the world's hungry people by 2015 is very much within reach.
To be sure, 870 million hungry people is still far too many hungry people, said the heads of the three UN food agencies in a forward to the report.
"In today's world of unprecedented technical and economic opportunities, we find it entirely unacceptable that more than 100 million children under the age of five are underweight, and are therefore unable to realize their full socioeconomic and human potential," they wrote.
FAO made headlines in 2009 when it said that 1 billion people - one-sixth of the world's population - were undernourished. A high-level summit was called at FAO headquarters in Rome. The UN chief went on a daylong hunger strike to show solidarity with the 1 billion. The Group of Eight devoted much of its summit that year to pledging US$20 billion for seeds, fertilizers and tools to help poor nations feed themselves.
It turns out, though, that the projections were wrong. They were calculated using figures from non-UN sources that were fed into the UN's number-crunching model, because FAO was under pressure from governments to quickly come up with an estimate of how many people might go hungry from the dual crises of high food prices and the global downturn, said Kostas Stamoulis, director of FAO's agricultural development economics division.
"There was considerable fear that combination of lower incomes and higher prices was going to cause significant undernourishment," Jomo Kwame Sundaram, FAO's assistant director-general for economic and social development, said.
But now, "no one really knows for sure if at any particular period whether that 1 billion figure was actually reached or not." The goal is to assess chronic hunger, rather than spikes due to temporary food shortages and price hikes, he added.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
