After decades of progress fighting global hunger, the last few years have seen a precipitous increase in the number of hungry people in the world. Kostas Stamoulis, the Secretary General of the Committee on World Food Security, puts it starkly, "we have more hungry people in the world [today], than we ever had in the history of human kind." The recent trend in hunger, shown in Figure 1, projects a historic high in 2009 with 1,020 million people going hungry every day. (FAO, 2009) "No part of the world is immune. All world regions have been affected by the rise of food insecurity," states FAO's Director-General Jacques Diouf. Two years ago the hunger rate also began to rise; meaning the number of hungry people grew faster than world population. These latest figures are not encouraging for the Millennium Development Goal of halving, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Figure 1: Number of Hungry People in the World (in millions)

Note: WFS is the World Food Summit

Source: (FAO, 2009)

According to FAO, the definition of hunger is the consumption of fewer than 1,800 calories a day. Chronic hunger was reduced in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, but hunger had been on the rise over the subsequent decade, albeit slowly. More recently, however, the number of hungry people has increased dramatically to an estimated 100 million more people in 2009, that is up 11 percent from last year's 915 million. (FAO, 2009) The 2009 projections by region in Figure 2 show that every region has seen an increase in hunger with all regions of the world having recorded double-digit increases in hunger from last year.

Figure 2: Estimated Regional Distribution of Hunger in 2009 (millions) and Increase from 2008 Levels (%)

Source: (FAO, 2009)

World cereal production has recorded the two largest harvests ever in 2008 and 2009. The increase in hunger is not the consequence of bad global harvests, but due to lower incomes and increased unemployment caused by the world economic crisis. (FAO, 2009) This deep economic downturn is following the food and fuel crisis that occurred from 2006 through the middle of 2008. While food prices in world markets declined over recent months, domestic prices in developing countries have come down more slowly. Still, international food commodity prices are 24 percent higher than in 2006 and 33 percent higher than in 2005. To put this expenditure in prospective, poor consumers spend up to 60 percent of their incomes on staple foods. (FAO, 2009) This has caused a strong reduction in their purchasing power across all goods and services and forgoing necessary calories. Added to these conditions, are negative changes in foreign direct investment, exports, official development assistance and migration remittances.

The latest numbers demand immediate and sustained action in order to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goal. There are six and a half years until that target date and the solution set is known. As stated by the Director-General of the FAO, Jacques Diouf "The challenge of eliminating hunger from the face of the planet is not anymore a question of lack of knowledge, or means in the hands of international community." Matthew Wyatt of the International Fund for Agricultural Development asserts the best way forward is to invest in small-holder farming. Two billion people depend on small farms and most of these include the roughly 1 billion hungry people. Agriculture was 20 percent of international aid, but had fallen to 3 percent by 2006 and demonstrates an obvious place to improve aid flows.

"The silent hunger crisis, affecting one-sixth of all of humanity, poses a serious risk for world peace and security," emphasizes Diouf. And Josette Sheera, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, states that "a hungry world is a dangerous world. Without food, people have only three options: They riot, they emigrate or they die. None of these are acceptable options."

EarthTrends
Nutrition: Percentage of population that is undernourished
Base of the Pyramid: Share of total household expenditure, food
Agricultural Production: Cereals, total production
Food Aid: Cereals donated by country
Food Aid: Cereals received by country