Good news on the global fight against hunger. Percentage of people suffering from undernourishment around the world:
In 2000, United Nations member countries agreed to ambitious development targets that they hoped to reach by 2015. These are the Millennium Development Goals. Among them was to reduce the number of people suffering from undernourishment, enough to cut the global hunger rate in half. Now 2015 is here, and it turns out the world is actually doing a pretty good job on the hunger rate. The UN has released the 2015 annual report on hunger, which it defines as chronic undernourishment — the inability to acquire enough food for at least one year. The total number of undernourished people has fallen by more than 200 million since 1990.
1990 - 92 28%
Key:
Middle Africa
5%
Western Asia
13% Africa
Asia
23% Latin America and the Caribbean
12% Oceania
20% Diagrams below show the percentage of undernourishment in selected area, globally. Each country has its own textured pattern and the size of each section relates to the percentage of those undernourished. 2
“...that we can indeed eliminate the scourge of hunger in our lifetime”
As a percentage of its total population, the developing world has cut undernourishment from 23.3% in 1990 to 12.9% today. It fell from 18.6% to 10.9% for the world population, missing the mark of halving hunger. Still, since 1990 31 more countries have met the UN goal of cutting hunger in half or bringing it under 5% of their populations. “The near - achievement of the Millennium Development Goals hunger targets shows us that we can indeed eliminate the scourge of hunger in our life time,” said José Graziano da Silva, director general of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
2005 - 07
2014 - 16
37%
41%
13%
8%
8% 14%
7% 20% 15%
20%
6% 12%
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United Nations says cutting food waste by a quarter would mean enough for everyone.
With the global population rising, wastage of products including 45% of all fruit and vegetables and 20% of meat is one of the greatest challenges to achieving food security. Estimates suggest that by 2050 food production will need to have increased by 60% on 2005 levels to feed a growing global population. Reducing food wastage would ease the burden on resources as the world attempts to meet future demand. In developing countries there are high levels of what is known as “food loss”, which is unintentional wastage, of ten due to poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure. In wealthy countries, there are low levels of unintentional losses but high levels of “food waste”, which involves food being thrown away by consumers because they have purchased too much, or by retailers who reject food because of exacting aesthetic standards. “In the developing world, food waste is vir tually nonexistent,” says Rober t van Otterdijk, coordinator of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Save Food programme. “Food waste is happening in countries where people can af ford to throw away food. One statistic is that the amount of food wasted by consumers in industrialised countries [222m tonnes a year] is almost the same as the total net food production of sub-Saharan Africa [230m tonnes].
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In the UK, 15m tonnes of food is lost or wasted each year. British consumers throw away 4.2m tonnes of edible food each year. This means that 11.7% of all food purchased is avoidably wasted, at an estimated cost to each family of £700 a year, or almost £60 a month. The food most commonly found in British bins are bread, vegetables, fruit and milk. “We have to do much more and it needs the par ticipation of public and private sectors,” he says. “But if it continues like this, with the same momentum, maybe af ter 10 years we’ll have globally signif icant results.”
“Food waste is happening in countries where people can afford to throw away food”
Household food and drink wasted in the UK:
32% Bread
24% Vegetables
24% Potato
20% Fruit
17% Cereal
17% Minority products
13% Meat + fish
12% Deserts, sweets + cakes 10% Eggs
8% Dairy
7% Soft drinks
6% Alcoholic drinks
Fig 2: Image shows the amount of food wasted in percentages. Each food item represents 1%. 5