In India, about 194.6 million people were undernourished in 2014-16, which was 15.2% of the population. In China, 133.8 million people were undernourished, which was 9.3% of the population.
The number of hungry people in the world has come down to 795 million people, 215 million down from the last decade, says an UN report. And yet, despite that, India still remains home to the second largest population of hungry people, after China.
In India, about 194.6 million people were undernourished in 2014-16, which was 15.2% of the population. In China, 133.8 million people were undernourished, which was 9.3% of the population.
The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015, or more popularly the UN Hunger report, states that undernourishment in the developing countries has come down by 12.9% of the population from 23.3% in the last decade.
The mammoth populations of both China and India, the report said, have posed impediments to progress among developing countries.
"Changes in large populous countries, notably China and India, play a large part in explaining the overall hunger reduction trends in the developing regions," read the report. "The evolution of hunger trends in India, in particular, has a significant influence on results for the region... Higher economic growth has not been fully translated into higher food consumption, suggesting that the poor and hungry may have failed to benefit much from overall growth," it further added.
The study was published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) on Wednesday.
The success stories mostly came from East Asia, Latin America and the Carribean, where due to investments in agriculture and by including the poor in economic growth, hunger rates were brought down.
The Hunger Report is closely related to the Millennium Development Goals, which were to end in 2015 and targeted the halving of undernourishment. As much as 72 of the 129 countries have achieved the goals, with the developing countries narrowly missing them. In Asia, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were unable to achieve the goals.
"The near-achievement of the MDG hunger targets shows us that we can indeed eliminate the scourge of hunger in our lifetime. We must be the Zero Hunger generation," said FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva, while releasing the report.
Southern Asia, the report said, has "the highest burden of hunger in absolute terms". And progress was too slow to achieve goals. Notable exceptions included Nepal and Bangladesh.
"Ensuring public nutrition requires paying attention to some important factors; direct feeding factors like availability, accessibility and affordability of enough quantity and quality of food. It also needs indirect factors like education, women empowerment, hygiene and sanitation etc. An enabling environment which has appropriate policies, including governance and accountability issues is also needed," said Dr Shweta Khandelwal, a nutrition expert at the Public Health Foundation of India.
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