World will be better fed by 2030 but hunger reduction will miss goal – UN report

The world's population will be better fed by 2030 and growth in food production will be higher than population growth, but hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will remain chronically hungry and the goal of halving the number of hungry by 2015 will not even be met by 2030, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today.

"By the year 2015/2030 per capita food supplies will have increased and the incidence of undernourishment will have been further reduced in most developing regions,” FAO Director-General Dr. Jacques Diouf writes in his foreword to “World agriculture: towards 2015/2030.” The Agency’s latest global assessment of the long-term outlook issued at its headquarters in Rome.

But parts of South Asia may be still in a difficult position and much of sub-Saharan Africa will probably not be significantly better off than at present in the absence of concerted action by all concerned, the survey notes. "Therefore the world must brace itself for continuing interventions to cope with the consequences of local food crises and for action to remove permanently their root causes," Dr. Diouf adds.

The number of hungry people is expected to decline from around 800 million today to about 440 million in 2030. This means, that the target of the World Food Summit in 1996, to reduce the number of hungry by half by 2015, will not even be met by 2030, the survey says.

“The report aims at describing the future as it is likely to be," Jelle Bruinsma, the report’s editor, said. "It does not describe the future as it ought to be nor does it provide a development strategy for global agriculture…We hope that governments and the international community use the report as a basis for their actions, to cope with both existing problems and with new ones that may emerge."

The projections, covering 140 countries and 32 crop and livestock commodities, analyze supply and demand for the major agricultural commodities and sectors, including fisheries and forestry.