Every seven seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies from the direct or indirect effects of hunger. This is the grim assessment drawn up by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, who presented his third annual report to the United Nations on the eve of World Food Day.
"Every day 100,000 people die of hunger or its consequences, and every four minutes a man loses his sight due to a lack of vitamin A," Ziegler continued, highlighting the fact that the number of undernourished people rose from 810 million in 2001 to 840 million in 2002.

Ziegler believes that the international community's objective of halving the number of people suffering from hunger by 2015 will not be achieved. "This situation is absurd: the FAO maintains that the planet can feed twelve billion human beings without difficulty, and we are 6.2 billion," the Swiss sociologist lamented.

"This is not an act of fate; there is no law of nature that explains this daily massacre," the sociologist added, stressing that of the 1.2 billion people living below the absolute poverty line as defined by the World Bank, 70 per cent are farmers.

Ziegler criticised multinational corporations, underlining that private capital plays an essential role in preventing the right to food from being realised around the world. "Multinationals are growing ever more powerful thanks to privatisation and globalisation, and the weak governments of poor countries can do nothing to curb their power. The time has come to enact laws that limit the abuses of power by multinationals, because a child who dies of hunger is being murdered by the world order."