UN to launch Hunger Report

Accra, May 22, GNA - On Wednesday May 27, the three Rome-based UN food agencies - will publish the 2015 edition of their annual The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) Report.

The SOFI Report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the UN World Food Program (WFP), covers new figures on the number of under-nourished people in the final year of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) cycle, and identifies critical factors in the effort to combat hunger.

A statement issued by the FAO said this year's edition of SOFI contains updated estimates of the number and proportion of hungry people in the world in 2015, the target year of the MDGs.

The Report also offers analysis into what drives successful anti-hunger programmes, such as agricultural investments, as well as the growing importance of social protection schemes and the new challenges presented by the increasingly protracted nature of crises.

The new Hunger Report would be presented at a news conference at the FAO's headquarters by FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva, IFAD Associate Vice-President Josefina Stubbs and Stanlake Samkange, Director of WFP's Policy and Programme Division. Maurizio Martina Italy's Minister of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policies, would participate via videolink from EXPO 2015 in Milan.

It said the event will be webcast live and followed by a question-and-answer session accessible to journalists not in Rome via Skype. French, Spanish and Italian interpretation will be provide

The statement said the new SOFI report, published in Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Spanish and Russian, would be available online at http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/

It noted that the FAO would also be releasing a series of companion reports following the SOFI launch, which would look more closely at regional hunger trends.

It said the calendar for presentation of these regional overviews is as follows: May 28: Asia and the Pacific (to be released from Bangkok); Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago de Chile)

June 2: Africa (Accra) and June 3: Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Budapest); North Africa and the Near East (Cairo).

GNA