In what could be food for thought for many of us as we sit by the table and relish our favorite dish and drink, an estimated 82 crore people i.e. one out of nine persons in the world, did not have enough to eat in 2018. The number is  up by over one crore from 81.1 crore in the previous year, which is the third year of increase in a row, a UN report has said.

The chances of being food insecure are higher for women than men in every continent,   'The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World' report released recently said asserting that this underscores the immense challenge of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) 2018 report says that around 19 crore ie 23 per cent of the undernourished people across the globe are in India which is facing a major malnutrition crisis, being home to the one-third of the world's stunted children.

About 38.4 per cent (or 4.66 crore) of kids aged under five in India are stunted - too short for their age, while 21 per cent of children in India are suffering from wasting, meaning their weight is too low for their height.

The UN report points out that the pace of progress in halving the number of children who are stunted and in reducing the number of babies born with low birth weight is too slow, which also puts the SDG 2 nutrition targets further out of reach.

At the same time, adding to these challenges, overweight and obesity continue to increase in all regions, particularly among school-age children and adults.

"Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only in scale but also in terms of multisectoral collaboration," the heads of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) urged in their joint foreword to the report.