UN food agency says 200 million more people hungry
The UN World Food Program said Monday that most of the developing world is paying more for food despite drops in commodity market prices during the global economic slowdown, with 200 million people joining the ranks of the hungry in the past two years,.
The agency's executive director Josette Sheeran blamed climate change, escalating fuel costs and falling incomes. She said the number of "urgently hungry" had now reached its highest ever - 1.02 billion.
"One out of six people in humanity will wake up not sure that they can even fill a cup of food," Sheeran told reporters. "We have to make no mistake that hunger is on the march."
She said while prices had tumbled on global commodities markets due to the financial crisis, the prices of most food staples in the developing world have soared.
"The food crisis is not over. We have an anomaly happening where on global, big markets, the prices are down, but for 80 percent of commodities in the developing world, prices are higher today than they were a year ago, and the prices a year ago were double what they were the year before that," she said.
"What it means is for about 80 percent of the developing world, people can afford one third as much food today as they could two or three years ago," she said.
She also said there had been a fourfold increase in the number of natural disasters in the past 20 years.
"All we know is that the world is facing increasingly frequent and ferocious natural disasters and the most vulnerable people and nations are getting hit hard and we better prepare now," she said.
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