The World Food Day - numbers and facts

We are celebrating today the World Food Day, with 150 countries around the world organizing special events, conferences, contests, sports activities and a global candlelight vigil on this year's theme, “The Right to Food”. However, some numbers and some facts demonstrate how nutrition and food are still a great challenge (source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations):

- our planet produces enough food to feed its entire population, but there are still 854 million undernourished people in the world, of which 820 million in developing countries, 25 million in countries in transition and 9 million in industrialized countries;
- of these people, 400 million of them are hungry children whose lives will be forever blighted by lack of nutrition in their first months;
- fifty-five percent of the 12 million child deaths each year are related to malnutrition;
- to reach the World Food Summit goal of reducing hunger by half by 2015, the number of hungry people needs to fall by 22 million a year. Currently it is falling by only 6 million a year;

More information on the World Food Day here.
The FAO Hunger Map here.