Ghana 4th best African performer in fighting hunger – Index

Ghana became Africa’s fourth best performer on the 2013 Global Hunger Index (GHI) released last week by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Ghana was behind Mauritius, South Africa and Gabon.

With a score of 8.3, Ghana was ranked 18th globally in the 2013 index.

Now in its eighth year, the GHI which was released to mark the World Food Day on October 16, 2013, combines three indicators – the proportion of the population that is undernourished, the proportion of young children who are underweight and the mortality rate for under-fives.

The GHI is designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger globally and by country and region. Calculated each year by IFPRI, the GHI highlights successes and failures in hunger reduction and provides insights into the drivers of hunger.

This year’s index was themed “Resilience in theory and in practice”.

According to the index, Ghana was the only African country south of the Sahara to be among the ten best performers in terms of improving its GHI score since 1990 to 2013. The index showed that Ghana reduced its hunger score from 25.5 in 1990, 19.6 in 1995, 15.6 in 2000, and 10.7 in 2005 to 8.2 in 2013.

Ghana recently met internationally-established targets in the fight against hunger and later received a UN award for the feat.

The UN food agency who made the announcement June 12, 2013, said Ghana was among 38 countries worldwide to have met the targets ahead of the 2015 deadline.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Ghana met targets of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) number one on halving the proportion of hungry people as well as the more stringent World Food Summit (WFS) goal of having reduced by half the absolute number of undernourished people between 1990-92 and 2010-2012.

Former Ghana President John Agyekum Kufuor also received the 2011 World Food Prize jointly with former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for their efforts in fighting against hunger.

Albania topped while Burundi came last on the 2013 GHI. The 2013 GHI fell by close to 34% from the 1990 GHI, from a score of 20.8 to 13.8.

According to IFPRI, the number of the hungry in the world has remained unacceptably high.

In 2010–2012, the FAO reported that about 870 million people were chronically undernourished.

By Ekow Quandzie