HUNGRY KIDS CAN'T LEARN

Hunger and malnutrition are killing nearly six million children each year – a figure that roughly equals the entire pre-school population of a large country such as Japan. Many of these children die from a handful of treatable infectious diseases including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles. They would survive if their bodies and immune systems had not been weakened by hunger and malnutrition.Progress towards reducing the number of hungry people in developing countries by half by 2015 has been very slow and the international community is far from reaching its hunger reduction targets. Around 75 percent of the world’s hungry and poor people live in rural areas in poor countries. These regions are home to the vast majority of the nearly 11 million children who die before reaching the age of five, including 8 million infants; of the 530 000 women who die during pregnancy and childbirth; of the 300 million cases of acute malaria and more than one million malaria deaths each year; and of the 121 million children who do not attend school. Reducing hunger should become the driving force for progress and hope, as improved nutrition fuels better health, increases school attendance, reduces child and maternal mortality, empowers women, and lowers the incidence and mortality rates of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis