International food aid to Africa has fallen and is unlikely to meet a goal set by the world's wealthiest countries to reduce hunger by half on the continent by 2015, U.S. congressional investigators said. In the early 1980s, 15 percent of global food aid went to Africa, but that share declined to 4 percent by 2006, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report. Meanwhile, the number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa has grown from 170 million to over 200 million. The food aid that has gone to Africa—particularly from the United States—has increasingly been to alleviate short-term emergencies rather than to address basic problems that slow long-term agricultural development, GAO said.
