On 23th, the IMF and World Bank released joint news in a report that till 2015 there will still be about 920 million extremely poor people around the world. Since the record of numbers of hungry people in 1970, the number of worldwide hungry people in 2009 has passed 10 million for the first time. Compared with that in 2008, the number increased by 1 million, which was about one-sixth of the world's population. These facts triggered the majorities’ concern about food once again. People question: is food enough for world eating now and for the next dozen years or decades?
Just from the numbers, it’s enough. Excluding soybeans and potatoes, only the per capita grain output reached 0.35 tons that is 0.95 kg per day. Presumably, about 1 kg of grain per capita should be able to be enough to eat.
However, due to the highly uneven distribution, many people in the world are in starvation. Let’s take some people in East Africa for example. They can eat 1 or 2 meals per day. And their daily food only accounts for a quarter to one-tenth of that of the West; in recent years, dozens of countries broke out the "hunger riots" because of rising food prices, such as, Africa, Latin America, Haiti and Ivory Coast.
Some people are hungry because some another people eat too much. In a 2009 survey data of obesity rate, the U.S. rate of overweight and obese adults passed 66%! The WHO data showed that the global obesity and overweight population is as high as 1.3 billion, far exceeding the number of hungry people.
Although there are also hungry people in the United States and other rich countries, but in general, most the world's population of hungry people are in developing countries, especially the Asia-Pacific region and Africa.
Obviously, if the developed countries whose people eat too much can “save” part of the food to the people who have little food enough to eat in developing countries through a variety of ways of technical and financial aids, perhaps our world may reach the state of "everyone has enough to eat". However, the worldwide food problem could become more and more serious in future because the growth rate of world population is more than that of cereal production. At the same time, climate change impact on world food production may be increasingly significant.