De seneste otte år er det gået støt fremad i kampen mod sulten – og bemærkelsesværdigt nok går det betydeligt hurtigere i Afrika syd for Sahara end i Sydasien med folkerige lande som Indien, Bangladesh og Pakistan, konkluderer “Global Hunger Index” på Verdensfødevaredagen onsdag.
LONDON, 16 October 2013 (IRIN): – Every year for the past eight years, the Global Hunger Index has mapped the world’s nutrition (ernæringstilstand) – se http://www.ifpri.org/publication/2013-global-hunger-index-0
Over time, the maps demonstrate progress:
The dark red splashes across Africa that signified “extremely alarming” levels of hunger have mostly faded to orange, and much of the orange is now yellow, meaning “serious” but not “alarming” – se kortet på http://cdn.wfp.org/hungermap
Ghana is now light green, meaning it has “moderate” hunger, an improvement from the “serious” level of 2006.
Similarly, many countries in Asia have shown great improvement.
The 2013 Index, which launches this week, shows yet further improvement.
The organizations that compile the Index are the International Food Policy Research Institute (IPFRI), Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe.
They say that 23 out of the 120 countries they track have made significant progress, improving their scores by 50 percent or more over the Millennium Development Goal (2015 Mål) baseline (mållinje) from 1990.
Among the top 10 in terms of progress are Angola, Ethiopia, Malawi and Niger, along with Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Goods news from Africa
Lawrence Haddad, the director of the Institute of Development Studies, who worked on this year’s Index, says the trends they have documented may overturn stereotypes (gøre op med vaneforestillinger).
“An interesting twist on this, is that in 2000 South Asia actually had a better score than sub-Saharan Africa, but now Sub-Saharan Africa has a better score than South Asia”, he said.
“We always default to (henfalder til) thinking that bad news is coming out of Africa, but at a regional level Africa has been doing better than South Asia over the past 10 to 15 years. So that is great.”
But Swaziland in dire strait
But amid the general improvement, many countries are still struggling.
Burundi, Eritrea and the Comoros are still deep in the red zone.
Swaziland, where the hunger is not as extreme, has nonetheless suffered a severe decline in nutrition; the Global Hunger Index estimates that hunger in Swaziland has increased by 38 percent since 1990.
Dominic MacSorley, the chief executive of Concern Worldwide, told IRIN:
“I think there are different factors. HIV/AIDS in Swaziland is one of the key contributors. There are other countries where [hunger rates change] in relation to urban density, and we know now that poverty, with the tip-over into more people living in urban environments, is a significant contributing factor”.
“And I think this is what is interesting, that our ideas about where we always think the poverty is – in the Sahel, in the non-urban areas – is now being challenged, which is going to force a change in how we work.”
Guiding programmes
Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/report/98945/global-hunger-falling-index-shows
