Hunger Rates Fall, but the Decrease Slows

18 October 2010

Indian street children eat food at a shanty town in Hyderabad

This is the VOA Special English Development Report.

The latest Global Hunger Index report says the number of hungry people worldwide has fallen twenty-five percent since ninety ninety.

Last year the estimate topped one billion for the first time. But this year's report says the number of people not getting enough to eat has fallen to nine hundred twenty-five million.

Still, many experts worry that hunger rates are not falling fast enough to meet United Nations goals. One of the first of the Millennium Development Goals is to reduce the hunger rate by fifty percent between ninety ninety and twenty fifteen.

Caroline Hurford at the U.N. World Food Program says the reduction in hunger rates has slowed in recent years.

CAROLINE HURFORD: "There has been a slight dropping off in the number of hungry people in the late nineteen nineties. But then it rose again, of course, during the financial crisis of two thousand seven-two thousand eight. And then the very high food prices, together with the high fuel prices, really knocked everything off track again. And then, of course, climate change has come in and that's made it more difficult to grow food."

The Global Hunger Index is prepared by three private organizations based in Germany, the United States and Ireland. The latest report says twenty-nine countries have levels of hunger that are considered "alarming."