Some key facts :

• One in six people in the world do not get enough food to be healthy.

• Worldwide, hunger and malnutrition are still the number one risks to health.

• 1.02 billion people in the world do not have enough to eat—more than the populations of USA, Canada and the European Union

• About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a half seconds.

• Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. This comes to 3 million children in a year, and one child every five or six seconds. Most of these deaths occurred in developing countries, especially sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two regions that also suffer from the highest rates of hunger and malnutrition.

• Vitamin A deficiency affects approximately 25 percent of the developing world’s preschoolers. It is associated with blindness, susceptibility to disease and higher mortality rates. It leads to the death of approximately 1 to 3 million children each year.

• Iodine deficiency is the greatest single cause of mental retardation and brain damage. Worldwide, 1.9 billion people are at risk of iodine deficiency, which can easily be prevented by adding iodine to salt.

• In the countries most heavily affected, HIV has reduced life expectancy by more than 20 years, slowed economic growth and deepened household poverty.

• In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the AIDS epidemic has orphaned nearly 12 million children aged under 18 years.