The hungry get hungrier

The good news is that the percentage of underfed people in the world is declining. The bad news is that the absolute number is increasing. By four million a year in fact.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, the number of hungry people in the world dropped by 37 million in the 1970s, by 100 million in the 1980s, and by 26 million in the first half of the 1990s, but in the last half of the 1990s it began to rise again. One in three people in sub-Saharan Africa lives in chronic hunger.

At the 1996 World Food Summit, the world's leaders pledged to halve the number of underfed people between 1990 and 2015, a target that will almost certainly be missed by a very wide margin.

This is not surprising at a time when the world is growing less food than it eats, reserves are shrinking, and crop yields have stopped rising. Things are not rosy on the world food front.