ROME/UK: The percentage of the world's population afflicted by chronic hunger or infected with the HIV/AIDS virus has risen to record proportions, according to two reports issued in Rome and London yesterday.
According to the annual report of the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), there are now 842 million people in the world suffering from hunger.
This figure represents a major setback in the fight to ensure "food security" since it means that the number of hungry, which had registered a modest falling-off in the early 1990s, is again on the increase.
On the AIDS front, the London-based UNAids organisation reports that more than 40 million people around the world, including 2½ million children, are now infected with HIV/AIDS.
Five million of these represent new infections, which means that every day an estimated 14,000 people contract the disease.
Furthermore, UNAids estimates that three million people died from HIV/AIDS in the last year.
According to the FAO report, The State of Food Insecurity in The World, the number of hungry people in developed countries, after falling by 37 million in the first half of the '90s, increased by 18 million in the second half of the decade.
This means that if the goal of reducing the number of undernourished people in the world by half by the year 2015, a target established at FAO's 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, is to be realised, then an "international alliance against hunger" must be formed.
Commenting on the report's conclusions yesterday, the FAO's assistant director-general, Mr Hartwig de Haen, said: "FAO has endorsed proposals to build an international alliance against hunger, an alliance that would start at sub-national and national levels bringing together governments, civil society organisations, the private sector and concerned individuals to mobilise the political will, technical expertise and financial resources needed to reduce the number of hungry people by at least half by 2015."
The FAO report, based on the years 1999-2001, points out that the vast majority of the world's undernourished, namely 798 million people, live in developing countries, while 34 million come from countries "in transition" and 10 million live in industrialised countries.
Only 19 counties, including China, managed to reduce the number of undernourished throughout the 1990s, while the trend shifted in the other direction in 17 other countries, including those with large populations, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Sudan.
The FAO report also links the phenomenon of chronically hungry people to that of countries afflicted by high rates of HIV/AIDS infection, arguing that the southern Africa food crisis of 2002-2003 proved that "hunger cannot be effectively combated in regions ravaged by HIV /AIDS". Some 60 to 70 per cent of southern African farms have suffered labour losses (deaths) as a result of HIV/AIDS.
This in turn had led to a radical transformation in farming practices since, lacking the resources and know-how to grow staple and commercial crops, many households simply cultivate survival foods.
In London, the UNAids report, published ahead of World Aids Day on December 1st, echoed some of the findings of the FAO report when pointing out that about 30 per cent of those infected with HIV/AIDS world-wide live in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa alone has 5.3 million infected people, while in Botswana, 39 per cent of the population is HIV positive.
Two out of three new HIV infections and three out of every four deaths from HIV/AIDS also occur in sub-Saharan Africa, the UNAids report says.
The UNAids report also claims that the number of reported infections is rising sharply in China, India, Indonesia and Russia, mostly due to HIV transmission through injecting drugs and unsafe sex.
Along with the World Health Organisation, UNAids had drawn up a strategy to bring anti-retroviral treatment to three million people by 2005, the so-called "3 by 5" initiative.
Commenting on that plan, the UNAids executive director, Dr Peter Piot, yesterday said: "It is quite clear that our current global efforts remain entirely inadequate for an epidemic that is continuing to spiral out of control. AIDS is tightening its grip on southern Africa and threatening other regions of the world.
"This report warns regions experiencing newer HIV epidemics that they can either act now or pay later - as Africa is now having to pay".