FAO hails China's contribution to improving food security

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hailed China's contribution to improving global food security via reducing poverty and chronic hunger, calling its cooperation 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 Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China had set forth a strategic plan for deepening agricultural and rural reform, he said.

"I am confident that, under this new leadership, China will achieve even greater success in its rural development and will thus give an even greater contribution to world food security," 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.

Graziano da Silva said the UN body had developed a proposal for a five-year FAO-China cooperation program to scale up the impact of South-South Cooperation on food security and nutrition.

According to the FAO chief, the war against hunger is "far from over." An estimated 842 million people still live with chronic hunger worldwide, while another 2 billion suffer serious nutrition-related problems.