India has world’s largest hungry population

NEW DELHI: India, the world’s largest foodgrain producer, also has the world’s largest hungry population, over 200 million. It ranks a poor 66th among 88 developing and transitional countries on the 2008 Global Hunger Index (GHI-2008), says a report by Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

GHI-2008 measured hunger on three fronts - proportion of people undernourished or calorie deficient; child malnutrition (underweight children under 5 years of age) and child mortality rates (malnutrition or disease deaths of children under 5 years).

The report found that hunger was a major threat in 33 countries, including India, owing to rising food prices. The fact that food importers outnumbered exporters implied many more countries were likely to suffer from higher prices.

Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25 sub-Saharan countries like Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo and Sudan, and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh, which ranked 70th. This was in spite of the fact that the per capita income in the African countries was much lower than India’s.

India’s slightly better performance over Bangladesh was because of higher agricultural productivity. But it fared worse than Bangladesh in child mortality.

Among the better-fed countries, Mauritius ranked 1st, followed by Jamaica, Moldova, Cuba and Peru. China ranked 15th, Thailand 23rd, Sri Lanka 39th, Nepal 57th and Pakistan 61st.