The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations celebrates World Food Day each year on 16 October, the day on which the Organization was founded in 1945.
The objectives of World Food Day are to:
- encourage attention to agricultural food production and to stimulate national, bilateral, multilateral and non-governmental efforts to this end;
- encourage economic and technical cooperation among developing countries;
- encourage the participation of rural people, particularly women and the least privileged categories, in decisions and activities influencing their living conditions;
- heighten public awareness of the problem of hunger in the world;
- promote the transfer of technologies to the developing world; and
- strengthen international and national solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty and draw attention to achievements in food and agricultural development.
United against Hunger
The theme of this year’s observance is United against hunger, chosen to recognize the efforts made in the fight against world hunger at national, regional and international levels.
Uniting against hunger becomes real when state and civil society organizations and the private sector work in partnership at all levels to defeat hunger, extreme poverty and malnutrition.
In 2009, the critical threshold of one billion hungry people in the world was reached in part due to soaring food prices and the financial crisis, a “tragic achievement in these modern days”, according to FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. On the eve of the hunger summit, Dr Diouf launched an online petition to reflect the moral outrage of the situation. The “1 billion hungry project” reaches out to people through online social media to invite them to sign the anti-hunger petition at www.1billionhungry.org.
On this World Food Day 2010, when there have never been so many hungry people in the world, let us reflect on the future. With willpower, courage and persistence – and many players working together and helping each other – more food can be produced, more sustainably, and get into the mouths of those who need it most.
THE 1 BILLION HUNGRY PROJECT 
Hunger, a quiet crisis, is rarely in the news.
Yet current calculations show that close to one billion people worldwide continue to go hungry on a daily basis. It now appears all but certain that the hunger target associated with UN Millennium Development Goal no. 1 – reduction of hunger by half by 2015 – will not be met.
On reflection, it is a situation that stirs feelings of frustration, indignation, even anger. Most people, if they believed it was within their power to change things, would take action.
The 1billionhungry project is a global communication campaign that offers a constructive outlet for people’s feelings of anger and indignation. It is a carefully orchestrated drive to attract at least one million signatures to a petition calling on national and international leaders to move hunger to the top of the political agenda.
