ROME, OCT 16: Africa and the Near East are making least progress towards a goal to halve world hunger by 2015, the UN world food body said on Monday.A report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation said the international community was well behind target to reduce the number of chronically undernourished around the world to 400 million by 2015 in line with a pledge at a 1996 food summit.FAO estimated that in 1996-98, 826 million people were undernourished - 792 million in the developing world and 34 million in the developed world, according to the report entitled "The state of food insecurity in the world 2000"."The number of undernourished people in the developing world is expected to fall to around 580 million by 2015 - an improvement, but still far short of the World Food Summit goal of a reduction by half, to about 400 million people," it said."Projections indicate that the 400 million figure will not be reached until 2030," added the report, released on the UN's World Food Day.Sub-Saharan and North Africa and the Near East were faring worst in the war on hunger, while Asia was making progress."If the goal were applied regionally, South and East Asia would be on track to approach it by 2015," FAO said."Sub-Saharan Africa and the Near East would remain far from the target, and Latin America would be in between."According to FAO, the number of undernourished people in Sub-Saharan Africa was projected to dip to 184 million in 2015 from 186 million in 1996-98.In the Near East and North Africa, the number of undernourished would actually rise - to 38 million in 2015 from 36 million in 1996-98."We are way behind target," FAO director-general Jacques Diouf told Reuters in an interview at FAO's Rome headquarters last week, prior to the release of the report."We are reducing the number of hungry people by eightmillion a year, but the necessary investment that has to go into agriculture is just not there," Diouf said.He said that international institutions and governments werenot investing enough in farming, while conflicts and increasingly extreme droughts and floods, were obstructing the battle against hunger and poverty.The FAO report said that in sub-Saharan Africa, highpopulation growth rates meant the number of undernourished people could increase slightly between now and 2015 before beginning to decline."This region is home to most of the world's poorestcountries, where prevalence of undernourishment is high and prospects for immediate and rapid economic growth are limited," it said.The central, southern and eastern parts of the continent areespecially hard hit.The report said the countries and regions where progress wasslow were caught in a trap of hunger and poverty, but a concerted, focused effort could make a difference and prove the projections wrong.
