The World Has Gotten a Lot Less Hungry

The awful news is that hundreds of million of people go hungry; the good news, contained in a UN report out today, is that that number is no longer 1 billion. In 1990, some 1.01 billion people worldwide qualified as undernourished, or "unable to consume enough food for an active and healthy life," per a press release accompanying the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 report. Today, that figure stands at 795 million (all but 15 million of them are in developing regions).

That's "a reduction of 21.4%, notwithstanding a 1.9 billion increase in the world’s population," per the report, with the current total representing about one out of every nine people. But the findings weren't all good, reports the New York Times: One out of every three people are hungry in parts of Africa, and the number of countries on the continent battling food crises has doubled since 1990, to 24. The report includes an interactive map. (More hunger stories.)