Rising food prices add 5 million to poor list

Rising international food prices and global recession may have led to addition of five million poor in India, a new global report released by UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on Tuesday, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Dec 11, 2008, 01:03:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Rising international food prices and global recession may have led to addition of five million poor in India, a new global report released by UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on Tuesday.

The report said there are 963 million hungry people worldwide, 40 million more than in 2007. In its latest report, the FAO had said this backward step stemmed mainly from soaring food prices and warned that the situation might become worse by the international economic crisis.

The food and financial crises have wiped out nearly 30 years of progress on reducing hunger, warned international NGO ActionAid, reacting to new figures from FAO. These numbers mean that 17% of the world’s population was going hungry, a level of malnutrition last seen in 1990. For India, the figure was 21 per cent of the population, a slight increase from the earlier percentage of 20.

The report said the increase in the number of undernourished in India could be attributed to a slowing growth in the per capita dietary energy supply for human consumption since 1995-97. While dietary energy demand has increased with life expectancy in India rising from 59 to 63 years since 1990-92, the supply has not increased substantially. This, the FAO blamed on continuing high consumer prices for food items despite a fall in global food prices.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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