adminROME. — The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation hailed China’s contribution to improving global food security via reducing poverty and chronic hunger, calling its co-operation with China over past 40 years “fruitful.”
“The 114 million people that China has rescued from hunger since 1990 represents nearly two-thirds of the total 173 million people lifted from food insecurity worldwide,” FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva wrote in a signed article.
“In 2013, the People’s Republic of China and the FAO celebrates 40 years of a fruitful collaboration. This partnership has contributed to improving food security in China and in the world,” he said.
China, as one of the nations that committed to forming FAO in 1945, had achieved the first of the UN Millennium Development Goals, namely, to halve the proportion of chronically hungry people between 1990 and 2015, Graziano da Silva said. The absolute number of people experiencing chronic hunger in China has declined by at least 42 percent since 1990, from 272.1 million in 1990-92 to 158 million in the 2011-2013, he said.
“These achievements by a country with 20 percent of the world’s population translate into a significant step forward in the fight against global hunger,” Graziano da Silva said. The director general said FAO and China had enjoyed “fruitful” cooperation on investment projects, ecosystem conservation and animal disease surveillance in the past 40 years. China was using its technical expertise to support food security and agriculture-related initiatives in 24 other countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific, through South-South Cooperation initiatives implemented with FAO, he said. — Xinhua.
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