The United Nations' food and farming body Tuesday renewed its plea for more effort to improve agriculture in poor countries to ease hunger and malnutrition which kill nearly 6 million children a year.

In its annual report, "The State of Food Insecurity in the World," the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said the world was way behind on hunger reduction goals for 2015 set at political summits over the last 10 years.

"If each of the developing regions continues to reduce hunger at the current pace, only South America and the Caribbean will reach the Millennium Development Goal target of cutting the proportion of hungry people by half," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf in the foreword to the report.

"None will reach the more ambitious (1996) World Food Summit goal of halving the number of hungry people."

The report uses 2004 data which estimated that 852 million people were undernourished during 2000-2002. The FAO will issue updated statistics in its 2006 report.

The FAO is urging a twin-track approach to tackling hunger, ensuring agriculture improves in poor countries while continuing to target food aid to the vulnerable such as women and children.

Most of the 6 million child deaths a year are not due to starvation but rather to neonatal disorders and diseases like diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles which would be easily curable if the victims were not weakened by lack of nutrition.

Of the 530,000 annual deaths of women due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth, 99 percent are in developing countries, the report says. Anaemia, often caused by malnutrition, is a risk factor in haemorrhaging, which causes one quarter of maternal deaths.

(China Daily November 23, 2005)