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ROME - The UN's food agency revised down the number of the world's hungry by 13.2 per cent on Tuesday to 868 million, but slammed the figure as "unacceptable" and warned that the fight against hunger was slowing.
"With almost 870 million people chronically undernourished in 2010-2012, the number of hungry people in the world remains unacceptably high," the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) said in its 2012 report on food insecurity.
The Rome-based food agency said the number of hungry was down from 925 million in 2010 and well under the one billion barrier crossed in 2009. But one in eight people around the world are still going hungry, it said.
"In today's world of unprecedented technical and economic opportunities, we find it entirely unacceptable that more than 100 million children under five are underweight," FAO head Jose Graziano da Silva was quoted as saying.
"Childhood malnutrition is a cause of death for more than 2.5 million children every year," he said.