ABSTRACT
This year’s Hunger Report highlights progress over the past five years on problems of food shortage, poverty-related hunger, maternal-child nutrition and health, and micronutrient malnutrition. It is constructed from the papers and discussions presented at the five-year follow-up to the Bellagio Declaration: “Overcoming Hunger in the 1990s” (1989).* The individual essays assess progress in achieving the Bellagio goals to overcome hunger by the end of the decade. These goals are: (1) to end famine deaths, especially by moving food into zones of armed conflict; (2) to end hunger in half the world’s poorest households; (3) to eliminate at least half the hunger of women and children by expanding maternal child health coverage; and (4) to eliminate vitamin A and iodine deficiencies as public health problems. The Bellagio Declaration also affirms that food is a human right, and insists that progress will come only when the joint efforts and energies of grassroots and community organizations are combined with state and international agencies to work against hunger. The concluding essays look into the future and suggest what else might be done beyond the turn of the century to meet the Bellagio goals.
