The number of chronically hungry people has passed 1bn for the first time – about one in six people – as the economic crisis compounds the impact of still high food prices, the United Nations said on Friday. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said that its latest estimates put the number of hungry people at 1.02bn, up from a revised 915m in 2008. The estimate confirms data advanced by the Financial Times earlier this year. The new UN assessment signals that the food and economic crisis of the last two years have reversed the past quarter-century’s slow but constant decline in the proportion of undernourished people as a percentage of the world’s population. Before the food crisis started in mid-2007, there were fewer than 850m chronically hungry people in the world, a level that has been roughly constant since the early 1980s owing to the global fight against poverty and countries such as China, India or Brazil lifting their economic growth over the last two decades. The most recent increase in hunger is not the consequence of poor global harvests but is caused by the world economic crisis that has resulted in lower incomes and […]