Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The 2009 Global Hunger Index



Above is a really neat interactive map distributed by the International Food Policy Institute. You can drag and drop the marker to any country and find the countries 2009 Hunger Index.

On this years report, the IFPI is calling on policy makers worldwide to consider how their decisions will effect the poor. The food and economic crises of the past year has had great impacts on the poor, greater than anyone else. So the IFPI asks world leaders to consider how their efforts to work out of the crises will impact the poor.

From the IFPI website, comes a summary of this year's Global Hunger Index findings, you can download a pdf or the report from here.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that worldwide progress in reducing hunger remains slow. The 2009 global GHI has fallen by only one quarter from the 1990 GHI. Southeast Asia, the Near East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean have reduced hunger significantly since 1990, but the GHI remains distressingly high in South Asia, which has made progress since 1990, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, where progress has been marginal.

Some countries achieved noteworthy progress in improving their GHI. Between the 1990 GHI and the 2009 GHI, Kuwait, Tunisia, Fiji, Malaysia, and Turkey had the largest percentage improvements. Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Vietnam saw the largest absolute improvements in their scores.

Nonetheless, 29 countries have levels of hunger that are alarming or extremely alarming. The countries with the highest 2009 GHI scores are Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone. In most of the countries with high GHI scores, war and violent conflict have given rise to widespread poverty and food insecurity. Nearly all of the countries in which the GHI rose since 1990 are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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