October 16, 2007 (LPAC)-- The UN marked World Food Day on Tuesday, with speeches and ceremonies at the Rome headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization, as well as events in 150 other countries around the world. In Rome, UN Director General Jacques Diouf spoke, Pope Benedict XVI and Ban Ki-moon sent messages. Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete called for a "green revolution" in sub-Saharan Africa, involving a major increase in irrigation-based agriculture, widely available and affordable higher-yielding seeds and other inputs, in order to, "consign hunger to history."

In 1996, the FAO World Food Summit pledged to reduce the number of undernourished people by half within 20 years (2015), however the number of hungry people continues to rise. "Keeping the summit pledge would require reducing the number of undernourished by 31 million every year until 2015, whereas the number of hungry is currently climbing at the rate of some four million a year," they said in a 2006 report. Developing countries have since reduced the overall number of undernourished by a mere three million to 820 million (from the baseline period of 1990-92). But that figure had been reduced by 100 million in the 1980s and 37 million in the previous decade, the FAO noted.