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UNITED NATIONS

About 830 million people around the world have not got sufficient food to eat because of natural disasters, armed conflicts and poverty, says the United Nations World Food Programme. "From generation to generation, people do not have enough food to eat,' said Catherine Bertini, the agency's executive director. The worst-hit regions include large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where tens of millions of people, most of them women and children, do not have sufficient food.

"The combination of poverty and natural calamities results in even lesser possibility of people building resources to end their hunger,' Bertini said. Of the 830 million undernourished people, 791 million live in developing countries and 200 million are children under age five. In more than 20 countries, hunger has been aggravated by drought, which the agency said has affected 100 million people. "We have seen an alarming trend where the poorest nations are hit simultaneously by both natural and human-made emergencies,' Bertini said.

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