According to the Global Hunger Index 2013-The Challenge of Hunger: Building Resilience to achieve food and nutrition security (published in October 2013), brought out by International Food Policy Research Institute, Concern Worldwide, Welthungerhilfe and Institute of Development Studies (please click here to download the report):
• The GHI combines three equally weighted indicators into one score: the proportion of people who are undernourished, the proportion of children under five who are underweight, and the proportion of children dying before the age of five. The 2013 GHI has been calculated for 120 countries for which data on the three component indicators are available and for which measuring hunger is considered most relevant.
• An increase in a country’s GHI score indicates that the hunger situation is worsening, while a decrease in the score indicates improvement in the country’s hunger situation.
• India's GHI score was 32.6 in 1990, 27.1 in 1995, 24.8 in 2000, 24.0 in 2005 and 21.3 in 2013. India's GHI score (21.3) in 2013 is worse than China (5.5), Sri Lanka (15.6), Nepal (17.3), Pakistan (19.3) and Bangladesh (19.4).
• India's proportion of undernourished in the population declined from 26.9 percent during 1990-1992 to 17.5 percent during 2010-12. Its prevalence of underweight in children under five years declined from 59.5 percent during 1988-1992 to 40.2 percent during 2008-12. The proportion of children dying before the age of five declined from 11.4 percent in 1990 to 6.1 percent in 2011.
• Nineteen countries still have levels of hunger that are “extremely alarming” or “alarming”. Most of the countries with alarming GHI scores are in Africa south of the Sahara. The only exceptions are Haiti, India, Timor-Leste, and Yemen.
• South Asia has the highest 2013 GHI score, although it witnessed the steepest absolute decline in GHI scores since 1990, amounting to almost 11 points. Compared with the 1990 score, the 2013 GHI score is 34 percent lower in South Asia.
• The number of the hungry in the world has remained unacceptably high: In 2010–2012, about 870 million people were chronically undernourished, and according to FAO, this number declined only slightly to 842 million in 2011–2013.
• The 2013 world GHI fell by close to 34 percent from the 1990 world GHI, from a score of 20.8 to 13.8.
• The world has made some progress in reducing hunger since the early 1990s. If the recent slowdown can be reversed, the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the share of hungry people in the world between 1990 and 2015 may be within reach. But we are not on track to meet the 1996 World Food Summit’s more ambitious goal of halving the number of hungry people in the same time period. In 1990–1992, 1 billion went hungry. Today, about 870 million, or 1 in 8 people worldwide, still suffer from hunger.
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