ROME: The number of hungry people in the world has dropped by 100 million over the last 10 years but one in nine are still undernourished, with Asia home to the majority of the underfed, the UN said on Tuesday.

The UN’s food agencies said the global number was down over 200 million since the early 1990s, but warned that despite the progress made, “about 805 million people in the world, or one in nine, suffer from hunger”.

But the battle to reduce hunger is being made more difficult not only by conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, but also by the Ebola crisis.

The Millennium Develop­ment Goal of halving the proportion of undernourished people by 2015 is within reach “if appropriate and immediate efforts are stepped up,” the Food and Agriculture Organisation, International Fund for Agricultural Development and World Food Programme said in a yearly report.

To date, 63 developing countries have reached the target and six more are on track to reach it by 2015, they said. “This is proof that we can win the war against hunger and should inspire countries to move forward, with the assistance of the international community as needed,” the agencies said in a joint message.

However, “the biggest challenge to achieving ‘zero hunger’ is conflicts which turn into food crises, such as in Iraq, Syria, South Sudan and Central Africa, as well as the Ebola crisis affecting Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone,” WFP head Ertharin Cousin told journalists at the unveiling of the report.

“The sick are not harvesting their crops and the loss of this harvest will be considerable, impacting up to 1.3 million people,” she said.

Time has run out: The “State of Food Insecurity in the World” report said access to food had improved rapidly in countries that had seen overall economic progress, notably in East and Southeast Asia, but also South Asia and Latin America.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2014