The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in their 2012 State of Food Insecurity report estimate the number of hungry in the world to be 868 million, 852 million of which are in developing countries. This is down from their past estimates of 925 million in 2010 and 1.02 billion in 2009.
The FAO, over the past year, has been in the process of improving its methodology for calculating chronic hunger and reviewing its data sources to reflect a more multidimensional view of food insecurity. Such revisions were called for by the Committee on World Food Security in 2011 and have resulted in this updated figure. Most notably FAO’s calculation of its undernourishment indicator has been adjusted and is thought to have declined more steeply up to 2007 than previous estimates while the actual impact of recent food price spikes on the number of hungry was less than originally thought.
There are reasons, however, why the 868 million should be considered conservative. For example, the calculation of food available for household consumption doesn’t take into account food wasted and while resource-poor households are unlikely to waste precious food, the FAO does recognise that “this effectively makes the FAO Prevalence of Undernutrition estimate a conservative indicator of food insecurity”. [Read more…]
One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World? 