ABSTRACT
In the 2010-12 period, approximately 870 million people in the world were under - nourished, meaning they did not consume enough food to maintain a healthy life. That number represents around 12.5 percent of the world’s population. The prevalence of hunger in the developing world in this period was higher, at around 15 percent of the population, or approximately 1 in 7 people. These figures show some improvement from the early 1990s, when there were 1 billion hungry people, representing around 19 percent of the world’s population.1 While these numbers indicate some improvement in the global battle against hunger over the past two decades, they still raise concern and show that much remains to be accomplished to improve world food security. The most recent figures on undernourishment, for example, are based on caloric needs for a sedentary lifestyle, something that we cannot easily assume meets the basic food needs for poor people in developing countries. If we consider that most poor people in developing countries lead a normally active lifestyle, the number of hungry people nearly doubles.2
