| India will halve its hunger by 2015: Study |
| BS Reporter / New Delhi October 12, 2007 |
| A study on global hunger says that hunger in India is on the decline and it is on track to reach millennium development goals on halving hunger by 2015. The findings were published in the Global Hunger Index of the global agency International Food Policy Research Institute today. The index is being released for the second year in a row in conjunction with German Agro Action and Concern Worldwide. A statement by the agency said that only two regions of the world - Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacific - are on track to reach all Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets related to hunger and child mortality. As part of the MDG, the international community set targets to cut hunger in half and under-five mortality rates by two-thirds by 2015. According to the Global Hunger Index, most countries will not reach all these targets if progress continues at current rates. "Because hunger has many faces, the Global Hunger Index uses a multidimensional approach that simultaneously captures various aspects of hunger and undernutrition," explained Doris Wiesmann, the IFPRI researcher who developed the Index. "By combining three indicators into one index and ranking countries accordingly, the Index gives us a very comprehensive picture of hunger in developing and transitional countries." The Global Hunger Index this year assesses whether developing countries are on track to reach MDG targets that relate to the three Index indicators - the proportion of people who are calorie deficient, child malnutrition, and child mortality. In Sub-Saharan Africa, many countries are particularly off-track for meeting the targets. Of the 42 countries ranked, 38 are off-track regarding child mortality, 35 are not on track when it comes to reducing child malnutrition, and 27 are off-track to reduce the proportion of people who are calorie deficient. Worldwide, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo experienced the greatest setbacks towards achieving the Global Hunger Index target for 2015, followed by Swaziland, Liberia, and North Korea. |
