Number of hungry worldwide tops 1bn

22 June 2009

The number of chronically hungry people has passed 1bn for the first time – about one in six people – as the economic crisis compounds the impact of still high food prices, the United Nations said on Friday.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said that its latest estimates put the number of hungry people at 1.02bn, up from a revised 915m in 2008. The estimate confirms data advanced by the Financial Times earlier this year.
The new UN assessment signals that the food and economic crisis of the last two years have reversed the past quarter-century’s slow but constant decline in the proportion of undernourished people as a percentage of the world’s population.

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