Food security and the challenge of the MDGs: the road Ahead.

• Author: Diouf, Jacques
• Position: Millennium Development Goals

In their solemn Millennium Declaration of 2000, world leaders committed themselves to spare no effort to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the world's people who suffer from poverty and hunger. Just seven years remain for us to meet that momentous challenge. Having passed the halfway mark in the race against hunger, the most important lesson we have learned is that it can still be won; however, a much greater and more sustained effort will be required of us.

Progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals' (MDGs) first and most important objective--eradicate poverty and hunger--has been uneven. On the one hand, according to the World Bank, at the global level the proportion of people living in extreme poverty fell from 28 per cent in 1990 to 20 per cent in 2003. On the other, for the proportion of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition in developing countries, where hunger is concentrated, only a 3-per-cent drop, from 20 to 17 per cent, was registered.

Measured in terms of the number of undernourished people, rather than of the prevalence of hunger in the total population, achieving the challenge appears even more daunting. Despite rapid economic growth in China and India, the Asia and Pacific region is still home to the greatest number of poor and hungry people in the world. The prevalence of undernourishment in the region is second only to that of Africa. In Latin America and the Caribbean, encouraging progress has been made, with the number of the hungry falling to 52 million in 2001-2003, about 12 per cent less than a decade earlier. Progress in Central America has not been so positive, however.

In all regions, the Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS)--the flagship initiative on hunger reduction of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)--is being scaled up to the National Programme for Food Security (NPFS). In over 100 countries worldwide, these programmes promote effective solutions towards the elimination of hunger, undernourishment and poverty. More than $770 million from donors and national governments have been invested in FAO-supported food security programmes, which promote national ownership and local empowerment. Almost half of these programmes are in sub-Saharan Africa, where the highest concentration of malnutrition is to be found and where one in three people suffered from chronic hunger in 2001-2003. The situation is complicated by rapid population growth and, now, by high...