Number of hungry people continues to increase

Hohoe, June 25, GNA - The number of the world's hungriest people escalates as G8 and G20 reneges on promises to act with dispatch. This was contained in a statement signed by Prof Shenggen Fan, Direc tor General, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

It said five years and a year after the G8 and G20 leaders respectiv ely promised at Gleneagles and a summit in L'Aquila to increase development assistance and advance global food security, the number of poor and hungr y people continue to rise.

The statement said global banking regulation, the European credit crisis and sovereign debt burdens are likely to dominate the G8 and G20 meetings in Canada this weekend.

The statement said "we are moving further away from the world commun ity's first Millennium Development Goal of halving the percentage of hungry peo ple between 1990 and 2015". It said in 2009 when the number of hungry people in the world stood at 1.02 million, "we were confronted with the need to reduce that number by 73 million people a year by 2015."

"It is now 2010 and the goal appears to be slipping away. Yet it is a modest one that would still leave some 600 million people deprived of foo d", the statement said.

The statement said the objective of cutting hunger in half could be achieved but business as usual would not be enough. What was needed was "business as unusual".

It called for investment in two core pillars, agriculture and social

protection aimed at reducing poverty and hunger in developing countries. It said scaling-up investments in social protection schemes that focuses on nutrition and health are crucial, advocating that policy-maker s increase investments in productive safety net programmes that support the

poorest and hungriest households for enhanced productive capacity. The statement suggested that new actors in the global development chain, the private sector, philanthropic organisations and emerging economies could provide effective and sustainable investment and innovati on to fight against hunger.

It proposed the adoption of country-led and bottom-up approaches towards maximizing the impact of the global agenda and tap external development assistance with home-grown efforts as the driving force. The statement called for the design of policies using evidence and experiments, which have the potential to improve policy-making by giving decision-makers best information to be tailored into planning. It urged decision-makers at the global, regional and national levels to walk-the-talk and to fulfil their commitments to policies and investments

for enhancing food security.