Hunger and malnutrition are killing nearly six million children each year, a figure that roughly equals the entire preschool population of a large country such as Japan, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a new edition of its annual hunger report published here on Tuesday.

According to the FAO's report titled The State of Food Insecurity in the World, many of these children die from a handful of treatable infectious diseases including diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles.

Hunger and malnutrition are among the root causes of poverty, illiteracy, disease and mortality of millions of people in developing countries, the report said.

The FAO hunger report focuses on the critical importance of hunger reduction, which is the explicit target of the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) and of the first Millennium Development Goal ( MDG 1) calling for the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

The report stresses that hunger reduction is also essential for meeting all other MDGs.

"Progress towards reducing the number of hungry people in developing countries by half by 2015 has been very slow and the international community is far from reaching its hunger reduction targets and commitments set by the MDGs and the WFS," wrote FAO Director-General Dr Jacques Diouf in the foreword to the report.

"If each of the developing regions continues to reduce hunger at the current pace, only South America and the Caribbean will reach the Millennium Development Goal target of cutting the proportion of hungry people by half. None will reach the more ambitious World Food Summit goal of halving the number of hungry people," Diouf said.

In 2004, FAO estimated that 852 million people worldwide were undernourished during the 2000-2002 period.

This figure includes 815 million in developing countries, 28 million in the countries in transition and 9 million in the industrialized countries.

The new hunger report does not provide a new update on the number of hungry people, new estimates will be provided in next year's edition.

Source: Xinhua