Worldwide there are more obese than malnourished (Red Cross)
In the world there are now more obese than malnourished people, but the share of food deprivation increases the growing crisis, the International Red Cross warned in a report published in New Delhi and referred by AFP.
Geneva-based humanitarian organization focused its annual report on world disasters on food issues, highlighting the gap between rich and poor, and the recent price increase.
According to statistics compiled by the Red Cross, 1.5 billion people worldwide are obese in 2010 and 925 million undernourished. ”If the free market work has resulted in a situation where 15% of humanity is suffering from hunger, while 20% are obese, it means that something went wrong”, said Secretary General Bekele Geleta, quoted in a statement.
Red Cross Director for Asia-Pacific region, Jagan Chapagain, considers that these statistics are “double-edged scandal”, adding that overeating today kill more people than hunger.
He said the lack of food supply is not due to a shortage in the world, but a bad distribution, with much waste, and increase prices, which made food less accessible.
Food prices have exploded worldwide in 2011, experts thinking about a food crisis similar to that of 2008, which caused unrest and political instability in many countries. Growth of these prices, which attaches to the Red Cross, among others, commodity market speculation and climate change, was considered one of the elements that triggered massive protests this year popular Maghreb and the Middle East.
Hunger and malnutrition kill nearly 6 million children a year, and more people are malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa this decade than in the 1990s, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.
Many of the children die from diseases that are treatable, including diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles, said the report by the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of malnourished people grew to 203.5 million people in 2000-02 from 170.4 million 10 years earlier, the report states, noting that hunger and malnutrition are among the main causes of poverty, illiteracy, disease and deaths in developing countries.
The U.N. food agency said the goal of reducing the number of the world’s hungry by half by the year 2015, set by the World Food Summit in 1996 and reinforced by the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, remains distant but attainable.
“If each of the developing regions continues to reduce hunger at the current pace, only South America and the Caribbean will reach the Millennium Development Goal target,” Jacques Diouf, the agency’s director-general, wrote in the report, the agency’s annual update on world hunger.
The food agency said the Asia-Pacific region also has a good chance of reaching the targets “if it can accelerate progress slightly over the next few years.”