22 November 2005

The development agency ActionAid International warned today that unless government leaders increase aid to poor rural farmers, including many women, their promise to halve the number of the world's hungry people by 2015 looks doomed.

The warning came after the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation launched its report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World.

The annual report said the number of people who go to bed hungry every night is 852 million - 18 million more than in 1996 when world leaders pledged to cut hunger by half by 2015.

Almost six million children die each year from illness linked to hunger and malnutrition - roughly equal to the entire pre-school population of a large country such as Japan. And hunger contributes to many of the 530,000 deaths a year of women due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth.

ActionAid says aid for agriculture has slumped from $6.7bn in 1984 to $2.7bn in 2002.

Magdalena Kropiwnicka, the agency's food and hunger policy adviser in Rome, said: "The vast majority of the world's hungry, 98 per cent, live in developing countries. Most of them are rural smallholder farmers. And seven in ten people who live in poverty are women. But, despite growing numbers of rural women becoming the sole breadwinner for their family, many lack access to land and food."