World Hunger Increasing, New U.N. Report Finds by Somini Sengupta The New York Times 9:33am 26th Nov, 2003   Published: November 25, 2003    AKAR, Senegal, Nov. 25 — The number of hungry people worldwide swelled in recent years, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to war, drought, AIDS and trade barriers, according to a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.    The report, titled "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003," found that after falling steadily in the first half of the 1990's, hunger grew in the latter half of the decade. Between 1999 and 2001, the most recent period for which data were available, the report found that more than 840 million people, or 1 in 7 worldwide, went hungry. Most alarming of all, the report found, between 1995 and 2001 across the developing world, the number of malnourished people grew by an average of 4.5 million a year.    Calling them "a setback in the war against hunger," the United Nations agency said that the latest findings would make it impossible to meet its goal of reducing world hunger by half by 2015. That goal, set first by the world body in 1996, was cited as a top priority by the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000.    The rise in hunger came even as the world produced ample food. "Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will," the report said.    The world body called on rich countries to invest in improving agricultural productivity in rural areas, conserving natural resources and expanding global market access for farmers in the developing world. Citizens of countries that spend significant portions of their limited export earnings on buying food from abroad are most likely to go hungry, the report concluded.    Anti-poverty advocates said the report underscored the need to tackle the underlying causes of hunger. "We tend to think of the solution as `Well, they need seeds and tools,' " Adrienne Smith, a spokeswoman for Oxfam America, based in Boston, said in a telephone interview. "Unfortunately there are structural issues that conspire to keep people from thriving."    Only 19 countries, including China, reduced hunger among its people throughout the 1990's. In an additional 17 countries, where hunger had begun falling in the early 1990's, the number of malnourished people climbed in the latter half of the decade, including in such densely populated nations as India, Nigeria and Sudan.    Most startling were the figures from war-torn countries like Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In those countries, a great many of them in West and Central Africa, agricultural production has ground to a standstill. In southern Africa, meanwhile, the H.I.V. pandemic has robbed families of their breadwinners, and some families have been forced to abandon their fields altogether.    Pointing to the success of some countries in combating hunger, the report singled out efforts by Brazil to tackle the root causes of hunger: poverty, unemployment and land distribution.
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