India's poverty grows

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India is emerging as the world centre of hunger and malnutrition, a report by Indian campaign group, the Navdanya Trust, says , according to the BBC.

200 million people - or one-in-four Indians - going without enough to eat.
57 million children in India are underweight due to malnutrition.

The Navdanya Trust says that per capita food consumption in India has decreased from 186 kg per person annually in 1991 to 152 kg in 2001, despite government food subsidies costing billions of dollars.

The prominent environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who runs the trust, said there were now more hungry people in India than in sub-Saharan Africa.She was also critical of genetically modified crops and chemical fertilisers, arguing that they only served to increase the costs of food production, forcing farmers into debt and in some cases causing them to commit suicide.

"Studies worldwide show that the hungriest of people are its producers - the farmers," she said.

A UN study released in June which said that hunger in South Asia had reached its highest level in 40 years because of food and fuel price rises and the global economic downturn. The report by the UN children's fund, Unicef, says that 100 million more people in the region are going hungry compared with two years ago.