World hungry reach One billion -UN

Mexico: The number of persons going hungry in the world reached one billion 20 million despite the increase in food production, reported today a source of the United Nations Organization (UN).

Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Relator on the right to food, highlighted in interview with daily La Jornada that hunger affects one sixth of the world population, slightly bigger part than the hungry people in Mexico.

The official considered the worst mistake is to believe that producing more food would lead to winning the struggle against hunger.

As he says, the crisis brought about by the rise in food prices has not ended.

Schutter who will arrive here on Monday in an official visit to Mexico, favored the adoption of global actions to limit the risks derived from financial speculation with grains, one of the causes of the hike in food prices.

Only in the first half of 2008, international cereal prices were the highest in 30 years, according to the Organization of the UN for Food and Agriculture (FAO).

Since then they have dropped, but keep above the levels registered in recent years and FAO forecasts they will keep being that way.

That organization considers a person with chronic hunger if they consume less than 2,100 calories per day.

For the UN official, to talk about food intake means to talk of social justice and in his opinion, it is poverty and not an unbalance between demand and supply what explains there is hungry in a world of abundance.

To give an idea of the situation there is an emergency in 32 countries, there are 58 developing nations where food items are 80 percent more expensive than 12 months ago and 40 percent higher than in January, 2009.

According to official figures, M‚xico cxontributes about half its 107 million inhabitants to the list of poor in the planet, while one third of it suffers extreme poverty.

This year, the Secretary of Social Development informed that in the current six-year mandate of president Felipe Calderon, about six million more have joined these statistics.

Mexico, Prensa Latina