ONE in eight people around the world is chronically undernourished, says the United Nations' food agencies.
It warns world leaders some regions would fail in halving the number of hungry by 2015.
In their latest report on food insecurity, the agencies estimated 842 million people were suffering chronic hunger in 2011-13, or 12% of the world's population, down 17% from 1990-92.
The vast majority of people suffering hunger live in developing countries, where the prevalence of undernourishment is estimated at 14.3%, the report found.
Africa remains the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment, with more than one in five people estimated to be undernourished, while most of the undernourished people are in southern Asia.
The 842m figure was lower than the last estimate of 868m in 2010-12 and 1.02 billion in 2009, but the report said progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goal to halve the prevalence of hunger in the world by 2015 was uneven.
Many countries were unlikely to meet the goal adopted by world leaders at the UN in 2000, said the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Food Programme and the International Fund For Agricultural Development.
Their report said: "Those (countries) that have experienced conflict during the past two decades are more likely to have seen significant setbacks in reducing hunger."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article