Celebrating World Food Day

In the ongoing battle against world hunger, while there's tons to celebrate, there's also much more to be accomplished.

ActionAid International, the global organization fighting world hunger and poverty, released its annual report Friday to coincide with World Food Day. The report card, titled "Who's Really Fighting Hunger," ranks both developing and developed nations for their performance and contributions to hunger eradication, and the results are revealing.

ActionAid praised many developing countries for their huge strides in erasing malnutrition and hunger, while simultaneously scolding several developed nations for giving far too little aid to those countries most desperately in need of assistance.

"Some of the poorest countries in the world are making striking progress on reducing the numbers of hungry people,” stated the report, "while some wealthy countries are lagging behind."

Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, Norway and Denmark took the top five positions, with excellent performance in their efforts at world hunger eradication. On the other end of the spectrum, ActionAid reports that "while some developing countries scored woefully, the United States [which placed 21 out of 22 countries ranked] scores just eight out of 100 on hunger eradication, while Italy scores just 19, mostly because of their miserly aid to agriculture."

And why are we scoring so poorly? Acording to ActionAid, "Our report card shows that most rich countries are reneging on their commitments to finance a more ambitious fight against hunger... Greece, Portugal, Italy, the United States and New Zealand are the worst offenders. And their contribution to expanding social security programs remains negligible."

Despite some wealthy nations backing out of their promised aid, for developing countries, there's much great news to celebrate. Brazil took the number one position out of 29 nations ranked, most notably for reducing child malnutrition by 73 percent over the past six years. Meanwhile, China placed second because it "cut hunger numbers by 58 million in ten years through strong state support for smallholder farmers."

Vietnam ranked fourth,while Ghana and Malawi ranked third and fifth, demonstrating "that with political will there is a way – even for poor countries."

Now that's the spirit. Check out the World Food Day Web site to learn more about events and efforts taking place all around the globe to fight hunger.

Photo courtesy Brian Solkol/ActionAid.