World Food Summit, Conflicts exacerbate hunger

World Food Summit

The World Food Summit was held in Rome in 1996, with the aim of renewing global commitment to the fight against hunger. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) called the summit in response to widespread under-nutrition and growing concern about the capacity of agriculture to meet future food needs. The conference produced two key documents, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action.

The Rome Declaration calls for the members of the United Nations to work to halve the number of chronically undernourished people on the Earth by the year 2015. The Plan of Action sets a number of targets for government and non-governmental organizations for achieving food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels.


Conflicts exacerbate hunger

The countries with the most worrisome hunger status and the highest 2008 GHI scores are predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Burundi, Niger, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the list. War and violence have been the major causes of widespread poverty and food insecurity in most of the countries with high GHI scores. Another common pattern is the lack of general freedom in terms of political rights and civil liberties.


All 15 countries with the highest GHI scores have been consistently rated by the Freedom House Index as non-free or partially free in the period 2006-2008. Eritrea and The Democratic Republic of Congo currently have by far the highest proportion of undernourished – 75 and 74 percent of the population, respectively. India, Yemen and Timor-Leste have the highest prevalence of underweight children under five - more than 40 percent in all three countries. Sierra Leone and Angola have the highest mortality rates for children under 5 years of age- 27 and 26 percent, respectively.