Hunger situation remains static

Number of undernourished people in Bangladesh has remained almost static in recent years despite the country's commendable improvement in food security status since 1990.

In fact, Bangladesh is one of the forerunners in achieving the first of eight Millennium Development Goals -- reducing extreme poverty rates by a half (from 58 percent to 29 percent) between 1990 and 2015. 

Number of undernourished people stands at 26.3 million compared to 26.5 million in 2010-12, said the State of Food Insecurity (Sofi) report-2015, a UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) flagship published annually on the eve of World Food Day (October 16). 

Sofi statistics show that number of Bangladeshi undernourished people dropped from 36 million in 1990 to 27.7 million in 2000 and further down to 24.3 million in the 2005-07 period.

But the pace has rather lost momentum in recent years as the number of undernourished people increased to 26.5 million in 2010-12, from which it has dropped by a mere 0.2 million now. 

According to Sofi-2015, during the last five years the number of undernourished people in two of Bangladesh's South Asian neighbours rose from 189.9 million in 2010-12 to 194.6 million now in India and from 38.3 million in 2010-12 to 41.4 million now in Pakistan.   

Undernourishment means that a person is not able to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum dietary energy requirements over a period of one year. 

Explaining the slack, as shown in the Sofi report, FAO Representative in Bangladesh Mike Robson told The Daily Star yesterday that it was nothing unlikely that the rate of reduction in undernourishment has been sluggish.

"Bangladesh has done well and we all know that it achieved some of the vital MDGs even ahead of time. But we have reached a point now that we need to identify the 'pockets' where things are not moving fast," said Mike Robson.

"May be we have to look into the areas where people lost their traditional occupations, we have to look into the vulnerabilities of elderly people, people lacking skills, differently abled persons and ethnic minorities," he explained. 

The FAO Representative thinks that in order to further reduce the number of undernourished people, Bangladesh also needs to focus on people living in shoals, river-erosion areas, khas lands and saline-prone areas.

Moving on to this year's World Food Day Theme -- Social Protection and Agriculture -- Mike Robson also put emphasis on giving as much attention in market and value-chain developments as is being given on production augmentation.

The UN FAO report said there are 795 million undernourished people now globally, down by 167 million since the last decade, and by 216 million since 1990–92.

For the developing regions as a whole, the share of undernourished people in the total population has decreased from 23.3 percent in 1990–92 to 12.9 percent now.