UN food agency calls for renewed effort to fight hunger:
If the world hopes to achieve a set of internationally agreed development targets by 2015, it must begin by tackling hunger and extreme poverty, especially in sub-Saharan Africa the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today.
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf told the committee, “We stand very little chance of achieving the rest of the goals – environment, education, child mortality, maternal health, gender equality, HIV/AIDS – unless the first MDG is achieved.”
The goal of halving the number of people suffering from poverty and hunger by 2015 appears to be within reach at the global level, said Prabhu Pingali, Director of FAO’s Agricultural and Development Economics Division.
He noted, however, that sub-Saharan Africa lags so far behind the rest of the world that close to half the world’s poor could be living there by 2015.