Nutrition

The production of 1 kg of meat needs 20 kg of wheat.

125% of the required food is produced in our world, but we consume 75% of it for meat production in industrial nations.

If all the food produced worldwide were distributed equally, every person would be able to consume 2,760 calories a day (hunger is defined as consuming fewer than 1,960 calories a day). [20]

Estimated number of people being undernourished worldwide (in millions):

	1995-1997 [1]	1996-1998 [2]	1997-1999 [5]	1998-2000 [3]
total	834	826	815	840
developing	800	792	777	799
transitional	34	26	27	30
developed		8 [4]	11	11

Overall, some 70 % of the poor in developing countries live in rural areas and derive their livelihoods from agriculture directly or indirectly. Growth of the agricultural sector is essential to reducing poverty and ensuring food security. [3]

Development assistance is critical for very poor countries with limited ability to mobilize domestic private and public savings for investment, particularly in agriculture, which is largely bypassed by foreign private investors. Yet official development assistance to agriculture declined by an alarming 48 % in real terms between 1990 and 1999. [3]

It also appears that external assistance to agriculture (EAA) is not related to need. Data for 1997-99 indicate that countries where less than 5 % of the population was undernourished received more than three times as much EAA per agricultural worker as countries where more than 35 % of the population was undernourished. Moreover, although EAA per agricultural worker declined across all categories during the 1990s, the countries with the highest prevalence of undernourishment were the hardest hit. In these, EAA declined by 49 % in real terms, leaving it at less than 40 % of the level of assistance received per agricultural worker in countries with the lowest prevalence of hunger. [3]