According to a new report published today by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 842 million people are chronically undernourished worldwide. This means that in the period 2011-13 one in every eight was suffering from hunger. The majority of the hungry live in developing countries, most of them in Southern Asia (295 million), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (223 million), the region with the highest prevalence of undernourishment, with one in four going hungry. The new figure is somewhat lower than the 868 million hungry reported last year. The FAO said the main reasons were continued economic growth, renewed interest of private investors in agriculture, as well as remittances from migrants to their home countries which helped reduce poverty. The report is optimistic that the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the proportion of the world’s hungry by 2015 could just be reached if the average rate of decline continues. According to revised estimates, in the base period 1990-92, about 23.6% of people in developing countries were undernourished while the current figure is at 14.3% – still above the goal of 11.8%. The more ambitious target of the 1996 World Food Summit to halve the number of hungry people in developing countries is out of reach: The number would have to drop to 498 million people from the 995 million in 1990-92. The report defends the FAO’s revised methodology which has earned criticism for underestimating undernourishment by assuming energy requirements for a minimum level of physical activity while poor people often face hard manual labour. The indicators used to measure undernourishment were also criticised for only capturing hunger lasting more than a year and neglecting micronutrient deficiencies. The report wants to address these limitations with a “new suite of indicators that aim to capture the multiple dimensions of food insecurity”.