(Photo Credit: Bernard Pollack)
The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) released this year’s hunger figures, showing that the number of chronically hungry people has decreased from 1.023 billion in 2009 to 925 million this year. FAO’s Director-General, Jacques Diouf, says that the 98 million drop in hunger is “no cause for complacency” since the numbers still remain high and reaching the first Millennium Development Goal—halving hunger by 2015—will be a struggle. He calls on the world to implement policies that will initiate agricultural development and to look at success stories that can be replicated around the world.
The figure was released in anticipation of the World Food Summit, to be held in New York next week and will be included in of the FAO and WFP’s annual publication, State of Food Insecurity in the World, which will be released this October.
Prepared by Abby Massey, research intern with the Nourishing the Planet project.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
