Birth woes
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They joined a growing group of countries to have reached international targets ahead of an end-of-2015 deadline.
During a ceremony at FAO headquarters, FAO director-general, José Graziano da Silva, awarded diplomas to China and Morocco for obtaining the Millennium Development Goal 1 (MDG-1). Chile, which had already reached its MDG-1 target, received the diploma for achieving the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) target.
The MDG-1 hunger target requires countries to halve the proportion of hungry people in the population before the end of 2015 compared to the level in 1990. The more ambitious WFS goal requires countries to at least halve the number of hungry people in the population before the end of 2015 compared to the level in 1990.
"One year ago we celebrated the first 38 countries that had achieved the MDG target, three years in advance of the 2015 deadline. Eighteen of them had also met the World Food Summit target. Now we come together to recognize three more countries for their efforts," da Silva says.
He stressed that the overall global objective remains the total eradication of hunger and malnutrition. "Even today, in a world of abundant food over 840 million people are still undernourished," the FAO Director-General says. "Ensuring food security and helping people overcome extreme poverty are the first steps to build the inclusive future we want, in which nobody is left behind."
Chile's Minister of Agriculture Carlos Furche, Morocco's Minister of Agriculture and Marine Fisheries, Aziz Akhannouch, and China's Vice Minister of Agriculture, Chen Xiaohua, represented their respective countries at the ceremony.
Forty countries have now achieved the MDG -1 while of these, 19 have achieved the WFS target. Such achievements, the FAO chief said, show how "the political commitment of governments is being transformed into effective action and concrete results in the fight against hunger."
He pointed out "strong regional commitments that support and stimulate national efforts to end hunger" including the 2025 Latin America and Caribbean Hunger-Free Initiative, moves by the African Union to endorse a zero hunger target for 2025 and the Asia-Pacific's embracing of the UN Zero Hunger Challenge.
"These are efforts that are supported by non-state actors and by the international community. They show that food security can be a reality in our lifetime," da Silva says.
During the ceremony, the FAO chief also commended 16 countries for having maintained their hunger rates below 5% dating back to at least 1990: Argentina, Barbados, Dominica, Brunei Darussalam, Egypt , Iran (Islamic Republic of), Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates.
