The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), has warned that the number of people expressing hungry in the world had been again on the increase.
According to the world body, the development is reversing years of progress on hunger.
FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said this in a statement at the start of its FAO biennial conference on Monday in Rome.
“Two years ago, FAO calculated that 795 million people in the world, about one in nine, did not have enough to eat.
“It also hailed the halving of hunger rates in developing countries from 23.3 per cent in 1990 to 1992 to 12.9 per cent in 2014 to 2016,’’ he said.
Da Silva said that new estimates on world hunger figures would be released in October.
He, however, noted that since 2015, the El Nino weather phenomenon and conflicts in places like Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen had worsened the global famine situation.
In a written message to FAO, Pope Francis decried the latest trends on the issue of hunger.
“A glance at the current world situation does not offer us a comforting picture, yet we cannot remain merely preoccupied or worse, resigned.
“This moment of evident difficulty must make us even more conscious that hunger and malnutrition are natural or structural phenomena in determined geographical areas.’’
According to the Pope, the development is as a ‘’result of a more complex condition of underdevelopment, caused by the indifference of many or the selfishness of a few.’’
