Hunger is mass killer far more lethal than headline-grabbing disasters .. [View All]

.. UN warns

13 October 2005 – Away from the media glare of immediate mass disasters, more than 6 million people have already died this year from the little-noticed chronic disaster of hunger and related diseases, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned in an appeal to the global community to act now.

To save scores of millions of these lives would cost the developed world over a whole year far less than it spends each week on agricultural subsidies, WFP Executive Director James Morris said in a message marking World Food Day yesterday.

At a time when the world has been shocked by the horrific images of the earthquake in Pakistan, where some 20,000 lives were wiped out in a matter of a few seconds, the donor community must not to forget that away from cameras lurked the biggest killer of all, he noted.

“Few people realize that hunger and related diseases still claim more lives than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. What is worse, the number of chronically hungry is on the rise again, after decades of progress. We're losing ground,” he added. <snip>

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=16203&Cr=WFP&Cr1=hunger