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[SHARM EL-SHEIKH, 22 May 2006] - Three hundred million children are hungry and 18,000 die every day for want of food while the world remains largely ignorant about the magnitude of the problem, the UN food agency head said. "If the headline in the media tomorrow was 'Forty-five 747s crashed today, everyone on board was killed and oh, by the way, they were all children', the world would be outraged," said James Morris, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). "I genuinely think the public doesn't understand how serious the issue is." Humanitarian agencies say wealthy governments are not giving enough to combat hunger, which kills more people than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria put together. In an interview with Reuters, Morris said 90 per cent of people who are hungry and at risk are not in the headlines, and their numbers are growing. "There are places in Central America where 50 per cent of the children under 5 are chronically malnourished and if you look at indigenous populations that number could be 70 or 80 per cent," he said. The world produces enough food to feed everyone, with 17 per cent more calories per person today than 30 years ago, according to the World Hunger Education Service. But the distribution is unequal. Pressure on scarce resources, drought, growing inequality and conflict have aggravated malnutrition among the unemployed in urban slums, landless farming families, the orphans of AIDS and the ill. Making things worse is a surge in natural disasters, which numbered 400 in 2005, up from 100 in 1975, according to World Bank estimates. In the last decade, 2.6 billion people were affected by natural disasters compared to 1.6 billion in the previous decade. "We've just so much to be concerned about," Morris said. The United Nations said this month it had received under a fifth of the $92 million it needed to help save 300,000 children threatened with starvation in the arid Sahel belt spanning Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. In eastern Kenya and Somalia there has been almost no rain this year, compounding a gradual decline in rainfall over the past decade. Morris said the WFP needed $275 million to stave off widespread starvation in Kenya alone, and "we still need a lot of that". Hundreds of thousands turned out across the world on Sunday for a global march against hunger organized by the WFP. "We know how to solve the problem," Morris said. "We can feed a child for 30 euros a full school year." Morris was speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, where business and political leaders debated ways to promote wealth, peace and stability in the Middle East. He warned against relying on macroeconomic statistics as a sole gauge of development, saying they hide a disparity in many countries between rich and poor. Without progress in combating problems like iron deficiency - which the WFP says hinders the mental development of 40 per cent to 60 per cent of children in developing countries, progress risks being held back. "Feeding children of zero to 2 years of age is the most powerful investment a country can make in its future economic wellbeing," said Morris. Further information
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