Will World Hunger Ever be Eliminated?
What role should developed nations play?

Rich nations help mainly by providing aid both for emergency relief as well as for programmes designed to solve the problem of poverty, such as subsidised education. Also, governments develop programmes such as the Food Stamp and School Lunch programmes in the U.S. that provide free food for people with food insecurity . However, the sad truth is that organisations such as the WFP and C.A.R.E. are desperately short of funds.

While rich donor nations have repeatedly promised to give the UN target of 0.7% of their GNP in aid to poor countries, a promise most recently reaffirmed at the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen, only the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Sweden have ever met this target . In fact, the amount of aid given annually has been steadily decreasing, with most countries planning to make even further cuts in aid budgeting. Clearly, the outlook for reaching UN goals of halving the numbers of hungry people by 2015 are dismalii.

Donor nations also have to fight what UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan calls "donor fatigue", where donors feel that they have done enough. Getting governments to provide aid for disasters which have not yet happened has also proven to be difficult. Despite warning the global community of the impending famine in the Horn of Africa over a year ago, the region has seen little of the already insufficient promised aid, with the result that hundreds of children have already starved to deathiv.

Next: So aid is the answer?