The United Nations food body urged countries on Tuesday to spend $24 billion a year to halve world hunger by 2015 and said a new anti-hunger program would bring major economic benefit to many millions of people. Without this investment, the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) fears there would still be 600 million hungry people in 2015. ``An additional public investment of $24 billion annually must be made in poor countries to halve the number of hungry people by the year 2015,'' FAO said in a new report entitled ''Anti-hunger program: Reducing hunger through agricultural and rural development and wider access to food.'' ``FAO stressed that the public investment should be accompanied by sufficient private resources,'' the report said. FAO is staging a June 10-13 food summit in Rome to step up its war on hunger. It says the international community has fallen behind a target set at a 1996 summit to halve the number of extremely malnourished people to 400 million by 2015. The U.N. specialized agency wants the world to put hunger much higher on the political agenda. It says the world produces more food than it needs but it is failing to reach the needy. Almost one person in seven does not have enough to eat, FAO says. Most of them live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. ``Halving hunger is expected to yield additional benefits worth at least $120 billion a year, resulting from longer and healthier lives for all those benefiting,'' FAO said in its appeal for a new anti-hunger program. NEW PLAN The program combines investment in farming and rural development with measures to improve access to food. It focuses mainly on small farmers and aims to create more opportunities for rural people -- 70 percent of the world's poor -- to improve their livelihoods. The FAO anti-hunger investment program includes: -- Mobilizing capital to raise farm productivity through investment in seeds, fertilizers and irrigation pumps; -- Development and conservation of natural resources; -- Expansion of rural infrastructure; -- Improvements in agricultural research; -- Programs to deliver food to the poorest people, such as food aid and school feeding, feeding pregnant women and nursing mothers and children under five, and food-for-work initiatives. Hunger can be caused by natural disasters such as drought, as well as economic mismanagement, conflict, trade distortions and diseases such as HIV/AIDS, FAO officials say. At least 10 million people in four southern African countries risk starving to death after two successive years of poor harvests caused by drought, floods and frost, as well as economic crises and disruption of farming, the U.N. says. North Korea, Afghanistan and Central America are among several other hunger hot spots around the world. FAO chief Jacques Diouf, in an interview with Reuters in April, urged the world to combat hunger far more aggressively and said more political will was needed. He says he wants to build an international alliance against hunger.:
