Hunger declining steadily worldwide

The United Nations says its 2009 announcement that 1 billion people in the world were hungry was off-target and that the number is actually 870 million

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization FAO in its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 report blamed flawed methodology and poor data for the projection,and said it now uses a much more accurate set of parameters and statistics to calculate its annual estimate of the worlds hungry

The FAO says the good news is that the number of hungry people has actually been declining steadily over the past two decades,although progress has slowed since 2007

The UN body says that the great recession of 200809 resulted in only a mild slowdown in GDP growth in many developing countries,and increases in domestic staple food prices were very small in China,India and Indonesia