Jacques Diouf, the director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is hosting the third World Summit on Food Security in Rome through Wednesday. The global public are invited to follow the “Hunger Summit” via webcast and photo galleries through www.fao.org/wsfs/en. Saudi Arabia has taken responsibility for the $2.5 million cost of the gathering. The FAO said that 60 heads of state and government are attending the meeting, which Pope Benedict XVI and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will address.
On Friday evening, Diouf began a 24-hour hunger strike to call attention to the scourge of hunger at a time when populations in developed nations are registering record levels of obesity. Each year six million children starve to death and according to a new report published by UNICEF last week, nearly 200 million children under the age of five living in poor countries have stunted growth because of insufficient nutrition. More than 90 percent of those children live in Africa and Asia, and more than a third of all deaths in that age group are linked to undernutrition. South Asian children are suffering horribly from malnutrition with Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan alone accounting for 83 million hungry children under five. The FAO has found that hunger now affects a record 1.02 billion globally, or one in six people, with the financial meltdown, high food prices, drought and war blamed.
The FAO says global food output will have to increase by 70 percent to feed a projected population of 9.1 billion in 2050. To achieve that, poor countries will need $44 billion in annual agricultural aid, compared with the current $7.9 billion, to increase access to irrigation systems, modern machinery, seeds and fertilizer as well as build roads and train farmers.
If you believe that it is unacceptable for children to starve, then make your voice heard by signing the petition sponsored by the FAO at www.1billionhungry.org. The global online petition asks signatories to agree that ending hunger and malnutrition should be the world’s number one priority. Learn more about hunger in the world by visiting FAO’s “Hunger Portal” at www.fao.org/hunger. Monitor the global food situation through www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation and make a donation to support small-scale community food production projects via https://getinvolved-donate.fao.org
