Food and agriculture organisation of the United Nations

Category: Website

 

Achieving food security for all is at the heart of FAO's efforts – to make sure people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives.

Their mandate is to improve nutrition, increase agricultural productivity, raise the standard of living in rural populations and contribute to global economic growth.

There is sufficient capacity in the world to produce enough food to feed everyone adequately; nevertheless, in spite of progress made over the last two decades, 870 million people still suffer from chronic hunger or Nutritional deprivation. Among children, it is estimated that 171 million under five years of age are chronically malnourished , almost 104 million are underweight, and about 55 million are acutely malnourished. 

We are apt to delude ourselves that only in the so called 'developing' nations are children malnourished, but there is ample evidence that the sun deprived children of the western world, sitting indoors on their computers all day or in school, fed on food from intensively farmed animals and crops, and bombarded by toxins, may be in a worse position.  Children in the developed countries are actually more sick than their 'under-developed world' counterparts.

 

An intergovernmental organization, FAO has 194 Member Nations, two associate members and one member organization, the European Union. It employs around about 3500 people [on 1 July 2012, FAO employed 1847 professional staff and 1729 support staff] plus a number of experts employed as and when needed. Approximately 55 percent are based at headquarters in Rome, while the remainder work in offices worldwide.

Their website is the Food and Agriculture of the United Nation  this provides freely available data on foodstuffs.

The FAO/INFOODS survey on fish and shellfish (aFiSh), for example, was published in the FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Database for Biodiversity (BioFoodComp2.0) and in the FAO/INFOODS Analytical Food Composition Database (AnFooD1.0), freely available at the INFOODS webpage.