Compared with last year, there are 100 million more people who are hungry, meaning they consume fewer than 1,800 calories a day, the agency said.
“No part of the world is immune,’’ said Jacques Diouf, the UN agency’s director general. “All world regions have been affected by the rise of food insecurity.’’
The crisis is a humanitarian one, but also a political issue.
Officials sought to stress the link between hunger and instability, noting that soaring prices for staples, such as rice, triggered riots in the developing world last year.
Josette Sheeran of the World Food Program, another UN food agency based in Rome, said hungry people rioted in at least 30 countries last year. Most notably, soaring food prices led to deadly riots in Haiti and the overthrow of the prime minister.
“A hungry world is a dangerous world,’’ Sheeran said. “Without food, people have only three options: They riot, they emigrate, or they die. None of these are acceptable options.’’
Even though prices have retreated from their mid-2008 highs, they are still “stubbornly high’’ in some domestic markets, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. On average, food prices were 24 percent higher in real terms at the end of 2008 compared with 2006, it said.
“Malnutrition kills through the fact that it weakens the immune system of a child,’’ said Andrei Engstrand-Neacsu, a Nairobi-based spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in East Africa. Some 22 million of the 1 billion hungry people counted by the UN are in the drought-stricken Horn of Africa, he said.
Engstrand-Neacsu said he had just returned from a corner of southern Ethiopia on the Kenyan border where the food situation is dire, and had been speaking to a family who lost a child to malaria in February. The parents said they were told their son couldn’t be saved because he was malnourished.
Engstrand-Neacsu called on donors to act before “skeletal African children are shown on the television screen at dinnertime’’ in the West.
