GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- Guyana's Agriculture Minister, Robert Persaud, is fearful the current global economic and financial crisis will significantly affect countries from achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing malnutrition by 2015.

Persaud, during the 2010 Budget debate on Friday, said while there are signs of global recovery a number of problems still linger. "The unemployment rate is still growing, businesses are still going bankrupt, and demand for global commodities remains sluggish," the minister said.

He added these challenges were further compounded by climate change, "ranging from monsoons to the drought-like conditions that we are now experiencing. As a result of these issues, global agricultural output in 2009 declined, and the sugar industry is an example of this." Persaud said agriculture plays an important role in any country and in Guyana particularly, in terms of reducing poverty and improving the wellbeing of people, especially those in rural areas.

The MDG calls for reducing the proportion of people living on less than US$1 a day to half the 1990 level by 2015 - from 27.9 percent of all people in low and middle income economies to 14.0 percent. The Goals also call for halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015. It was forecasted that if the growth remains on track, global poverty rates will fall to 12.7 percent - less than half the 1990 level - and 363 million more people will avert extreme poverty.

But the global economic, financial and food crises in recent months have not changed that fortune and millions more are slipping into hunger putting in jeopardy the MDGs. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation's estimates on hunger and malnutrition released in October 2009 said 1.02 billion people are undernourished, a sizable increase from its 2006 estimate of 854 million people.

The FAO accredited this increase to the neglect of agriculture relevant to very poor people by governments and international agencies; the current worldwide economic crisis, and the significant increase of food prices in the last several years which has been devastating to those with only a few dollars a day to spend.

1.02 billion people is 15 percent of the estimated world population of 6.8 billion; nearly all of the undernourished are in developing countries.