Originally published January 12 2006
FAO releases new figures on child deaths resulting from starvation
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that six million children die each year from hunger and malnutrition.
Hunger and malnutrition kill nearly six million children every year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report.
"Many of these children die from a handful of treatable infectious diseases including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles.
They would survive if their bodies and immune systems had not been weakened by hunger and malnutrition," the Rome-based body said Tuesday in a statement introducing the report.
The annual hunger report estimates that 852 million people were malnourished during the period 2000-02, of whom 814.6 million were in developing countries.
In the same period, 33 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's population suffered malnourishment as well as 16 percent of the population in Asia and the Pacific, the report says.
The report criticises the slow pace of progress towards the United Nations' Millennium Development goal set out in 2000 of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015.
"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 of cutting the proportion of hungry people by half," FAO Director General Jacques Diouf says in the report.
Priority must be given to tackling poverty in rural areas, which are home to around 75 percent of the world's poor, the report says.
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