A/HRC/7/5 page 2 Executive summary Despite real advances in different countries, such as the People’s Republic of China, India, South Africa, and several Latin American and Caribbean countries, there has been little progress overall in reducing the number of victims of hunger and malnutrition around the world. The number of people suffering from hunger has increased every year since 1996, reaching an estimated 854 million people despite government commitments to halve hunger at the 2000 Millennium Summit and at the 2002 World Food Summit. Every five seconds, a child under 10 dies from hunger and malnutrition-related diseases. Yet hunger and famine are not inevitable. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the world already produces enough food to feed every child, woman and man and could feed 12 billion people, or double the current world population. Our world is richer than ever before, so how can we accept that 6 million children under 5 are killed every year by malnutrition and related illnesses? All human beings have the right to live in dignity, free from hunger. Today is the moment to look forward, not back, as so much remains to be done in promoting and protecting the right to adequate food. Indeed, one of the key remaining problems is the lack of coherence within the United Nations system, between the positive developments in some sectors of the system, for example as evidenced by the FAO’s Right to Food Guidelines, and the way in which the policies and practices of other agencies, such as IMF and the World Bank, as well as WTO, undermine protection of the right to food. State policies relating to the right to food also show similar patterns of inconsistency. While States have recognized the right to food in the World Food Summit Declarations and more than 150 States are parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), at the same time they engage in trade policies that are detrimental to the enjoyment of human rights in other countries. Other important issues must still be addressed, for example, the exclusion and discrimination of the most vulnerable. Particular attention has to be given to the protection of the right to food for disadvantaged groups, especially women and indigenous people. Another phenomenon which greatly affects the right to adequate food is the powerful so-called “non-State actors” on the international scene: the transnational corporations. These actors are ever more powerful, yet we lack control mechanisms to guard against the violations of the right to food some of them are sometimes responsible for committing. Other issues which remain on the agenda and which will require significant work in the future are desertification, biofuels and refugees from hunger. Yet there is also much hope. The Right to Food Guidelines were adopted by the FAO Council and the elaboration of the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR is progressing, as are global, regional and national commitments to fight hunger.