WORLD: UN report on the state of food insecurity in the world

On World Food Day 16October, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will launch its annual report - The State of Food Insecurity in the World. The report will be released simultaneously in London, Washington, Nairobi, Bangkok, Berlin, Rome, Dublin and several other cities.The UN document reports on global and national efforts to reach the goal set by the 1996 World Food Summit and introduce a new tool to assess the depth of hunger. At the World Summit, held at FAO Headquarters in Rome, leaders of 185 countries and the European Community pledged to reduce by half the number of undernourished people in the world by the year 2015, FAO said. Last year, FAO reported on the number of chronically hungry people in the world. "This year the report goes one step further, assessing the depth of their hunger by measuring the number of calories lacking in the diets of undernourished people, based on the number of calories needed just to maintain body weight and perform light activity," FAO said.The FAO report will be launched in London on Monday, 16 October at 11:30 a.m. at the London office of UNIC, Midland Tower, and presented by Hartwig de Haen, FAO Assistant Director General, Economic and Social Department, and Barbara Burlingame, of the FAO Nutrition Division.