The FAO has published its annual report on global hunger statistics. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 declares that the number of hungry people in the world has dropped to 795 million – 216 million fewer than in 1990-92, despite a global population increase of 1.9 billion people. The full report can be accessed here: The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015
The FAO report’s graphic showing the changing distribution of hunger in the world, 1990-92 and 2014-16, using pie charts
The report has many statistics and charts that support the key messages. Many of the charts give a good visualisation of the numbers. However, I noticed a couple of pie charts that didn’t make it particularly easy to identify the differences between regions (image on the right).
Below is a slopegraph that depicts the change in the regional distribution of hunger between 1990-92 and 2014-16. This makes it a lot easier to compare the change, rather than the viewer having to compare between two pie charts.
Immediately, differences between regions start to jump out at you. Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean have reduced hunger and achieved the Millennium Development Goal 1c target (“Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger”). Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa now account for larger shares of global undernourishment, with numbers of undernourished having only slightly reduced in Southern Asia, and having increased in Sub-Saharan Africa, since 1990-92. All of the in-depth data and analyses can be found in the report: The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015
