Most people undernourished

Undernourishment has increased sharply and food production has fallen as Burundi struggles to cope with rapid population growth, severe land degradation and simmering civil conflict, FAO said in its first edition of ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World’, released last week. The report said the proportion of undernourished people in Burundi rose from 38 percent in 1980 to 63 percent in 1996, the largest increase in all of central, eastern and southern Africa. Average daily food intake fell during the same period from 2,020 calories to 1,669 calories, which was “far below minimum requirements,” the report said. Burundi’s annual population growth rate of 2.7 percent had strained the country’s limited land resources “to the breaking point”, and more than 80 percent of its fragile, mountainous land was severely degraded, it stated. While the country was now almost completely dependent on domestic food production, solutions to its food security problems “must be found outside agriculture,” the report said. [The full report is available at http://www.fao.org]