UN: World hunger rate fallen by 50 percent over the last 25 years

The number of hungry people globally has declined by roughly 50 percent over the last quarter of a century, a joint report by three United Nations agencies said on Wednesday.

In 2000, the international community adopted the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a commitment to halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger during the 1990-2015 period.

In fact, in developing regions' hunger rates fell from 23.3 per cent in 1990-92 to 12.9 per cent in 2014-16, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said.

"Allowing for a margin of reliability of the background data used to estimate undernourishment, the [50-per-cent reduction] target can be considered as having been achieved," FAO, IFAD and the WFP said in the 2015 edition of The State of Food Insecurity in the World report.

In absolute terms, 795 million people - about one in nine - presently do not have enough to eat, including 512 million living in Asia and 233 living in Africa, the Rome-based agencies said. In 1990-92, the figure was 991 million.