The BBC reports today that the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has released their annual report on global hunger. There is some good news in that the number of undernourished people fell between 2009 and 2010, but, at 925 million, that number is still “unacceptably high.” In 2001 the UN designated a 50% reduction in the number of hungry people by 2015 as one of its Millennium Development Goals, but achieving this goal has proven extremely difficult and many aspects of the crisis have worsened.
What makes this problem so frustrating is that the world doesn’t lack for food—we have more than enough to feed every living person on the planet. But nearly a billion people continue to suffer from food shortages, unsafe water, and malnutrition. To understand why, turn to Thomas J. Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson’s Atlas of World Hunger. The Atlas makes unique use of maps to provide both a comprehensive overview of global hunger—its multiple causes and long-lasting effects—and to search for solutions to it. You can take a look at a PDF excerpt from the book here.