The ability of the world to feed itself has improved dramatically over the last three decades. Intensive agriculture and new crop varieties have fueled steadily increasing per capita food production. Decreasing world food prices have made food more available to a greater number of people. In 1975, approximately one in three people in developing countries was underfed; today, the number of underfed has dropped to onein five.
The long-term sustainability of this progress, however, is increasingly at risk. Advances in major crop yields, such as wheat and rice, have slowed. The intensive use of land and water, which brought major production increases, now brings growing environmental costs. And most significantly, world population continues to grow at the rate of nearly 100 million people per year--mostly in the developing world.
Though millions have benefited from the world's agricultural progress, the
distribution of global food supplies is very uneven, with hunger still prevalent in someregions of the world, particularly South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The challenge of world hunger in the 1990s is real: 800 million people are chronically undernourished. More than 180 million children around the world are severely underweight. 13 million people die every year from hunger and related causes (mostly children under age 5). An estimated 35 million people "at risk" needed 4.5 million tons of emergency food assistance in 1994. Most hunger is still found in rural areas--large regions of persistent poverty, such as the Horn of Africa, where development has failed and fragile ecosystems and civil strife combine to keep hunger alive. Rapid urbanization has also drawn growing numbers of rural poor who have little or no access to jobs and are therefore unable to feed their families.
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