A UN food agency says a record 1.02 billion people are hungry across the world, or one-sixth of humanity. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the historic high is the result of the financial downturn combined with persistently high food prices. The number of hungry people is about 100 million higher than last year. The agency's Director-General Jacques Diouf says the hunger crisis “poses a serious risk for world peace and security.” The Rome-based FAO says in the report released Friday that almost all the world's undernourished live in developing countries. Some 642 million are hungry in the Asia and the Pacific region, and 265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean and 52 million in the Middle East and north Africa. Some 15 million are hungry in developed countries, the FAO said. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN World Food Program (WFP), recalled food riots in several developing countries in the past two years and warned at the news conference: “A hungry world is a dangerous world.” Diouf called for a “new world food order” enshrining the “right to food and thus the right to exist,” urging stepped-up investment in agriculture. “With the right support smallholder farmers can double or triple their yields,” Sheeran said, adding: “Food has to be addressed as one of the pillar challenges that the world is facing.” The FAO had initially revised downward its estimate of hungry people from 963 million to 915 million because of a “better-than-expected global food supply,” the agency said. “Whereas good progress was made in reducing chronic hunger in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, hunger has been slowly but steadily on the rise for the past decade,” the FAO said. “This year, mainly due to the shocks of the economic crisis combined with often high national food prices, the number of hungry people is expected to grow overall by about 11 percent,” the agency projects. “The silent hunger crisis... poses a serious risk for world peace and security,” the statement warned. “We urgently need to forge a broad consensus on the total and rapid eradication of hunger in the world and to take the necessary actions.” It noted that poor consumers spend up to 60 percent of their incomes on staple foods.
