Introduction: Hunger and the Right to Food

Abstract

It is an affront to human dignity to see how many people starve to death or live a life not worthy of the name, in conditions of squalor and unable to escape, with minds and bodies that are not whole. In the period 1997– 1999, there were 815 million undernourished people in the world – mainly in the 122 third world countries.¹ The shocking news is that in the last decade global hunger has continued to increase. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2008 report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, showed that hunger had increased to 923 million gravely undernourished children, women and men, compared to 848 million in 2007, despite already warning in 2003 of a ‘setback in the war against hunger’. In 2009, FAO announced that for the first time, more than one billion people were undernourished in the world, primarily in developing countries. Before the world food crisis of 2007–2008, important progress in reducing hunger had been made in a few countries. But hunger is now on the rise everywhere. The overall trend is one of regression, rather than the progressive realization of the right to food.