ANKARA
Eurasia has reduced the incidence of hunger by half, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report on Tuesday.
The change means that Eurasia has reached an important Millennium Development Goal in 2015.
The FAO's first-ever report on food insecurity and malnutrition in Europe and Central Asia covers 53 countries including Turkey, and tracks the trends that are shaping the nutrition map for the regions.
"Undernourishment is at less than 5 percent in Eurasia, the lowest level of all five FAO world regions," the report said.
Translating this into numbers: fewer than 6 million people in the region today suffer from hunger, compared with 9.9 million in 1990/92. Europe and Central Asia are at the forefront in terms of progress toward achieving the even more stringent World Food Summit goal of halving the absolute number of those who go hungry in the same time period.
"The problems of food insecurity have changed from caloric sufficiency to diet quality – a trend that will likely continue in this way," the FAO said.
The report is a companion to FAO’s recent report global report, "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015," which said the number of hungry people in the world has dropped by 216 million over the last 20 years but one person in nine is still undernourished. Translating this into numbers, 795 million people still suffer from hunger.
Steadily declining hunger rates are seen from Lisbon to Vladivostok since 2000, as post-Soviet countries have emerged from the so-called “transition recession” and incomes in the entire region have risen robustly, the report said.
According to FAO’s estimates, almost all countries have an adequate average level of calories available to their population. The prevalence of hunger remains high in only one country of the region – Tajikistan. However, that country has also made great strides since 2005/07.
Despite the good news on under-nutrition, both rich and poor countries in the region suffer from malnutrition, in the form of micronutrient deficiencies and obesity. Both phenomena are frequent among children under 5, with micronutrient deficiencies causing stunting and anaemia.
The rise of obesity in children could become a serious financial burden on national healthcare systems in post-Soviet and Balkan countries.
In the last 15 years, access to food has become less of a challenge as a result of poverty reduction. In Europe and Central Asia this was a result of an accumulation of institutional reforms and higher economic growth rates.
However, as the report notes, there is not a one-to-one mapping of countries with lower poverty rates to those with no significant hunger problems. All countries in the region (with two exceptions) have reduced their rate of undernourishment to less than 10 percent, while not all have reduced poverty rates to that level.
The report also shows that Turkey's proportion of undenourished in the total population is less than 5 percent.
Presenting the report in Ankara, FAO programs coordinator Sheikh Ahaduzzaman said that economic growth is necessary but not suffient in Turkey to reduce hunger further.
Ahaduzzaman said the report's main messages for Turkey: "Growth needs to be inclusive to reach the poorest."
Increasing the productivity of smallholder and family farms, higher incomes and greater access to food, social protection such as school-feeding and cash transfers are all means to reduce hunger directly. They also foster economic opportunities and build resilience.
