More hunger in Africa

last updated 8 January 2015

Kinshasa, Congo

Wealthy nations are cutting back on food donations just as hunger is rising in Africa, the U.N. food agency warned this week. Most of the increase is taking place in Central Africa because of a civil war that started in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spread to five other countries. Some 840 million people in the world are hungry every day, 36.4 million of them in Congo. The U.N. said food donations have slacked off, and rich countries are way behind schedule to meet the goal they set in 1996 of halving world hunger by 2015. During widely publicized famines, food pours in from the West, said Charles Riemenschneider of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. When hunger “starts to slip off the front page of the newspapers,” he said, “donors tend to slow down.”